
) 9 76 i- 



OEATIOl^ 



DELIVERED BEEORE THE 



City Council and Citizens of Boston, 



ONE HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE DECLARATION 
OF AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE, 



JULY 4, 1876. 



BY 



HON. ROBERT C. WINTHROP. 




PRINTED BY ORDER OF THE CITY COUNCIL. 

MDCCCLXXVI. 



ORATION 



DELIVERED BEFORE THE 



6'^ 7 

7^ 



City Council and Citizens of Boston, 



ONE HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE DECLARATION 
OF AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE, 



JULY 4, 1876. 



BY 



HON. EGBERT C. WINTHROP 




§ s t It : 

PRINTED BY OEDER OF THE CITY COUNCIL. 

MDCCCLXXVI. 






/S7g 'r 




iiiaas^^. 



WOV 2 4 1916 



/ 



CITY OF BOSTON. 



In Common Council, July 6, 1876. 
Resolved, That the thanks of the City Council are due, 
and they are hereby tendered, to the Hon. Robert C. Win- 
THROP for the very appropriate, interesting and eloquent 
oration delivered by him before the Municipal Authorities of 
this city, upon the occasion of the one hundredth anniversary 
of the Declaration of American Independence ; and that he 
be requested to furnish a copy of the same for publication. 

Sent up for concurrence. 

J. Q. A. BRACKETT, 

President. 

In Board of Aldermen, July 10, 187G. 
Concurred. 

JOHN T. CLARK, 

Chairman. 

Approved July 11, 1876. 

SAMUEL C. COBB, 

Mayor, 



SERVICES AT MUSIC HALL. 



The oration was delivered in Music Hall, which was 
appropriately decorated for the occasion. A large audience 
was present. After music by the Germania Baud, the 
Mayor, the Hon. Sajviuel C. Cobb, addressed the audience 
in the following words : — 

" The audience will please give attention Avhile prayer is 
offered by the Rev. Henry W. Foote." 

Rev. Henry W. Foote, pastor of King's Chapel, then 
offered the following jjrayer : — 

PRAYER BY THE REV. MR. FOOTE. 

Lord Grod of our fathers, whose faithfulness and mer- 
cies are unto children's children, to such as remember 
thy commandments to do them, we thank thee that 
we can come to thee in the name, and as disciples, 
of our Lord Jesus Christ* On this memorial day, as 
we rejoice before thee with grateful millions, we ask 
that the gladness of our country may be filled with 
thankfulness for thy mercies, and that thou wilt 
sanctify the proud memories and the glad hopes of 
this hour. We bless thee, O thou who art the God 
of nations and of men, that thou wast with our 
fathers in the days of old; thtit tbou didst bring them 



6 SEKVICES AT MUSIC HALL. 

hither across the trackless deep, the seed-gram of a 
great nation; that thou didst cast out the heathen 
before them to make room for the vine of thy choos- 
ing, and that our hills are covered with its shadow 
and the boughs thereof are like the goodly cedar. 
We thank thee that thou wast with our fathers 
in the time of battle to strengthen their hearts 
through weary years of war, to strengthen their 
hands to smite mighty kings, and to give them the 
sure fruits of peace. We bless thy name that thou 
wast with them in the spirit of wisdom and under- 
standing, to inspire their hearts with those great 
principles of liberty and justice which shine as stars 
to lead all nations to a better day; and we bless thee 
that thou wast with them in the spirit of knowledge 
and of thy fear, to establish their work in a nation 
that should endure for centuries. We remember be- 
fore thee with thankfulness the great and heroic men 
whom thou didst raise up to be their leaders in the 
time of war, their counsellors in the days of peace; 
we bless thee for their patience in adversity, their 
soberness in triumph, their wisdom, their purity, 
their patriotism, their faith in thee ; and we pray that, 
as thy servant shall speak to us of the mighty and 
enduring work which they wrought, the memorial of 
their virtues may abide in our hearts, and the power 
of their example strengthen us daily to thy service 
and thy praise. We thank thee, O our guardian 



JULY 4, 1876. 7 

God, that as a reunited people, this nation bows 
before thee in this memorable hour; that thou hast 
put away all feeling of bitterness from between us, 
and from the ^orth and the South, the East and the 
West, we come up together into thy kingdom of 
peace and love. Bless, we pray thee, our mother- 
country and her Queen; remove all memories of 
ancient strife from our hearts, and grant that the ties 
of blood and of faith may bind us together through 
centuries to come. Rule thou in. the hearts of our 
rulers in the spirit of loyalty and incorrupt faithful- 
ness, and grant that this people may be indeed a 
nation whose God is the Lord, built upon that right- 
eousness which alone can exalt a people. Hear us, 
we pray thee; strengthen us in thy faith and love, 
and let thy kingdom come and thy will be done. 
We ask it as disciples of Jesus Christ, our Lord. 
Amen. 

At the conclusion of the prayer, the Germania Band 
played a selection, after which the Mayor introduced the 
reader of the Declaration of Independence, in the following 
words : — 

Fellow-Citizens, Ladies and Gentlemen, — 

On the 4th of July, 1776, a document was pub- 
lished in Philadelphia, solemnly proclaiming the birth 
of a nation. The passage of time has made that dec- 
laration good, and has placed that new-born nation 



8 SERVICES AT MUSIC HALL. 

on a jDimiacle of greatness and power, making" the 
date an era in the history of civil liberty and of the 
world's civilization. It is fit that that historic paper 
should be read on this Centennial Anniversary in all 
the assemblies of the people throughout the land. 

It will now be read here; and I regard it as a felic- 
itous circumstance that its momentous utterances 
should reach us to-day through the lips of one whose 
ancestor's name stands subscribed to it, and who 
represents, in name and blood, a succession of illus- 
trious men who, in the highest stations of honor and 
public service, have borne a conspicuous part in the 
national history and counsels, from the first day to 
the last of the intervening century. 

I present to you Brooks Adams, Esq. 

The Declanitioii of Indepeudciice was then read by Mr. 
Adams, after which the Mayor spoke as follows : — 

In casting about for one who might worthily grace 
this Centennial occasion by taking the chief part in its 
observance, we did not have to search long before 
coming to a name so identified with the high accom- 
plishments of the scholar, the orator, and the states- 
man, that the bare mention of it was equivalent to an 
election. 

We have considered it a fortunate coincidence that 
the gentleman designated for this service, by the 



JULY 4, 1876. 9 

qualifications I have mentioned, bears the name of 
one who was conspicuous in the annals of Boston 
more than a century before the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence, — the name of one who presided with 
honor and dignity over the destinies of the infant city 
in the days when it was but a straggling village on 
the shore of this peninsula. 

We all know that neither the century of our 
national existence, nor the two centuries and a half 
that have passed since the settlement of Boston, 
have dimmed the lustre of that name and lineage. 

I present to you, fellow-citizens, the Honorable 

KOBEKT C. WlNTHKOP. 

At the conclusion of the Mayor's remarks, the Hon. 

Robert C. Winthrop delivered the following oration. 
2 



ORATION. 



»>»;<= 



Again and again, Mr. Mayor and Fellow Citizens, 
in years gone by, considerations or circumstances of 
some sort, public or private, — I know not what, — 
have prevented my acceptance of most kind and 
flattering invitations to deliver the Oration in this 
my native city on the Fourth of July. On one of 
those occasions, long, long ago, I am said to have 
playfully replied to the Mayor of that period, that, 
if I lived to witness this Centennial Anniversary, 
I would not refuse any service which might be 
required of me. That pledge has been recalled by 
others, if not 4-emembered by myself, and by the 
grace of God I am here to-day to fulfil it. I have 
come at last, in obedience to your call, to add my 
name to the distinguished roll of those who have 
discharged this service in unbroken succession since 
the year 1783, when the date of a glorious act of 
patriots was substituted for that of a dastardly deed 
of hirelings, — the 4th of July for the 5th of March, 
— as a day of annual celebration by the j^eople of 
Boston. 

In rising to redeem the promise thus inconsidei-- 



12 ORATIOX. 

ately given, I may be pardoned for not forgetting, 
at the outset, who presided over the Executive 
Council of Massachusetts when the Declaration, 
which has just been read, was first formally and 
solemnly proclaimed to the people, from the balcony 
of yonder Old State House, on the 18th of July, 
1776 ; * and whose privilege it was, amid the shoutings 
of the assembled multitude, the ringing of the bells, 
the salutes of the surrounding forts, and the firing 
of thirteen volleys from thirteen successive divisions 
of the Continental regiments, drawn up " in corre- 
spondence with the number of the American States 
United," to invoke " Stability and Perpetuity to 
American Independence! God save our American 
States ! " 

That invocation was not in vain. That wish, that 
prayer, has been graciously granted. We are here 
this day to thank God for it. We do thank God 
for it with all our hearts, and ascribe to Him all the 
glory. And it would be unnatural if I did not feel 
a more than common satisfaction, that the privilege 
of giving expression to your emotions of joy and 
gratitude, at this hour, should have been assigned to 
the oldest living descendant of him by whom that 
invocation was uttered, and that prayer breathed up 
to Heaven. 

And if, indeed, in addition to this, — as you, Mr. 

* Jiimes Bowdoin. 



JULY 4, 1876. 13 

Mayor, so kindly urged in originally inviting me, — 
the name I bear may serve in any sort as a link 
between the earliest settlement of ^NTew England, two 
centuries and a half ago, and the grand culmination 
of that settlement in this Centennial Epoch of 
American Independence, all the less may I be at 
liberty to express anything of the compunction or 
regret, Avhich I cannot but sincerely feel, that so 
responsible and difficult a task had not been imposed 
upon some more sufficient, or certainly upon some 
younger, man. 

Yet what can I say? What can any one say, here 
or elsewhere, to-day, which shall either satisfy the 
expectations of others, or meet his own sense of the 
demands of such an occasion? For myself, certainly, 
the longer I have contemplated it, — the more deeply 
I have reflected on it, — so much the more hopeless 
I have become of finding myself able to give any 
adequate expression to its full significance, its real 
sublimity and grandeur. A hundred-fold more than 
when John Adams wrote to his wife it would be so 
forever, it is an occasion for " shows, games, sports, 
guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end 
of the continent to the other." Ovations, rather than 
orations, are the order of such a day as this. Emo- 
tions like those which ought to fill, and which do fill, 
all our hearts, call for the swelling tones of a 
multitude, the cheers of a mighty crowd, and refuse 



14 ORATION. 

to be uttered by any single human voice. The 
strongest phrases seem feeble and powerless ; the 
best results of historical research have the dryness 
of chaff and husks, and the richest flowers of rhetoric 
the drowsiness of " poppy or mandragora," in 
presence of the simplest statement of the grand 
consummation we are here to celebrate : — A Cen- 
tury of Self-Government Completed ! A hundred 
years of Free Kepublican Institutions realized and 
rounded out ! An era of Popular Liberty, continued 
and prolonged from generation to generation, until 
to-day it assumes its full proportions, and asserts its 
rightful place, among the Ages ! 

It is a theme from which an Everett, a Choate, or 
even a Webster, might have shrunk. But those 
voices, alas! were long ago hushed. It is a theme 
on which any one, living or dead, might have been 
glad to follow the precedent of those few incom- 
parable sentences at Gettysburg, on the 19th of 
j^ovember, 1863, and forbear from all attempt at 
extended discourse. It is not for me, however, to 
copy that unique original, — nor yet to shelter my- 
self under an example, which I should in vain aspii'e 
to equal. 

And, indeed, Fellow Citizens, some formal words 
must be spoken here to-day, — trite, familiar, com- 
monplace words, though they may be; — some words 
of commemoration; some words of congratulation; 



JULY 4, 1876. 15 

some words of glory to God, and of acknowledgment 
to man; some grateful lookings back; some hopeful, 
trustful, lookings forward, — these, I am sensible, 
cannot be spared from our great assembly on this 
Centennial Day. You would not pardon me for 
omitting them. 

But where shall I begin? To what specific sub- 
ject shall I turn for refuge from the thousand 
thoughts which come crowding to one's mind and 
rushing to one's lips, all jealous of postponement, all 
clamoring for utterance before our Festival shall 
close, and before this Centennial sun shall set? 

The single, simple Act which has made the Fourth 
of July memorable for ever, — the mere scene of the 
Declaration, — would of itself and alone supply an 
ample subject for far more than the little hour which 
I may dare to occupy; and, though it has been 
described a hundred times before, in histories and 
addresses, and in countless magazines and journals, 
it imperatively demands something more than a 
cursory allusion here to-day, and challenges our 
attention as it never did before, and hardly ever can 
challenge it again. 

Go back with me, then, for a few moments at 
least, to that great year of our Lord, and that great 
day of American Liberty. Transport yourselves 
with me, in imagination, to Philadelphia. It will 
require but little effort for any of us to do so, for all 



16 OllATION. 

our hearts are there ah*eady. Yes, we are all there, 
— from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the Lakes 
to the Gulf, — we are all there, at this high noon of 
our ^N'ation's birthday, in that beautiful City of 
Brotherly Love, rejoicing in all her brilliant displays, 
and partaking in the full enjoyment of all her pag- 
eantry and pride. Certainly, the birthplace and the 
burial-place of Franklin are in cordial sympathy at 
this hour; and a common sentiment of congratulation 
and joy, leaping and vibrating from heart to heart, 
outstrips even the magic swiftness of magnetic wires. 
There are no chords of such elastic reach and such 
electric power as the heartstrings of a mighty IS'ation, 
touched and tuned, as all our heartstrings are to-day, 
to the sense of a common glory, — throbbing and 
thrilling with a common exultation. 

Go with me, then, I say, to Philadelphia; — not to 
Philadelphia, indeed, as she is at this moment, with 
all her bravery on, with all her beautiful garments 
around her, with all the graceful and generous con- 
tributions which so many other Cities and other 
States and other ]N^ations have sent for her adorn- 
ment, — not forgetting those most graceful, most 
welcome, most touching contributions, in view of the 
precise character of the occasion, fi-om Old England 
herself; — but go with me to Philadelphia, as she was 
just a hundred years ago. Enter with me her noble 
Independence Hall, so happily restored and conse- 



JULY 4, 1876. 17 

crated afresh as the RimnjTiiede of our Xation; and, 
as we enter it, let us not forget to be grateful that no 
demands of public convenience or expediency have 
called for the demolition of that old State House of 
Pennsylvania. Observe and watch the movements, 
listen attentively to the words, look steadfastly at the 
countenances, of the men who compose the little 
Congress assembled there. Braver, wiser, nobler 
men have never been gathered and grouped under a 
single roof, before or since, in any age, on any soil 
beneath the sun. What are they doing? "What are 
they daring? Who are they, thus to do, and thus to 
dare ? 

Single out with me, as you easily will at the first 
glance, by a presence and a stature not easily over- 
looked or mistaken, the young, ardent, accomplished 
Jefferson. He is only just thirty-three years of age. 
Charming in conversation, ready and full in council, 
he is " slow of tongue," like the great Lawgiver of 
the Israelites, for any public discussion or formal 
discourse. But he has brought with him the reputa- 
tion of wielding Avhat John Adams well called " a 
masterly pen." And grandly has he justified that 
reputation. Grandly has he employed that pen 
already, in drafting a Paper which is at this moment 
lying on the table and awaiting its final signature 
and sanction. » 

Three weeks before, indeed, — on the previous 7th 



18 ORATION. 

of June, — his own noble colleague, Richard Henry 
Lee, had moved the Resolution, whose adoption, on 
the 2d of July, had virtually settled the whole ques- 
tion. ISTothing, certainly, more explicit or emphatic 
could have been wanted for that Congress itself than 
that Resolution, setting forth as it did, in language 
of striking simplicity and brevity and dignity, " That 
these United Colonies are, and of right ought to 
be, Free and Independent States; that they are 
absolved from all allegiance to the British crown, and 
that all political connection between them and the 
State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally 
dissolved." 

That Resolution was, indeed, not only comprehen- 
sive and conclusive enough for the Congress which 
adopted it, but, I need not say, it is comprehensive 
and conclusive enough for us ; and I heartily wish, 
that, in the century to come, its reading might be sub- 
stituted for that of the longer Declaration which has 
put the patience of our audiences to so severe a test 
for so many years past, — though, happily, not to-day. 

But the form in which that Resolution was to be 
announced and proclaimed to the people of the 
Colonies, and the reasons by which it was to be 
justified before the world, were at that time of intense 
interest and of momentous importance. 'No graver 
responsibility was ever devol-s^d upon a young man 
of thirty-three, if, indeed, upon any man of any age, 



JULY 4, 1876. 19 

than that of preparing such a Paper. As often as I 
have examined the original draft of that Paper, still 
extant in the Archives of the State Department 
at Washington, and have observed how ver^ few 
changes were made, or even suggested, by the illus- 
trious men associated with its author on the com- 
mittee for its preparation, it has seemed to me to be 
as marvellous a composition, of its kind and for its 
purpose, as the annals of mankind can show. The 
earliest honors of this day, certainly, may well be 
paid, here and throughout the country, to the young 
Virginian of " the masterly pen." 

And here, by the favor of a highly valued friend 
and fellow-citizen, to whom it was given by Jefferson 
himself a few months only before his death, I am 
privileged to hold in my hands, and to lift up to the 
eager gaze of you all, a most compact and convenient 
little mahogany case, which bears this autograph 
inscription on its face, dated " Monticello, JSTovember 
18,1825:" — 

" Thomas Jefferson gives this AVriting Desk to 
Joseph Coolidge, Jun^ as a memorial of his affection. 
It was made from a drawing of his own, by Ben 
Pandall, Cabinet-maker of Philadelphia, with whom 
he first lodged on his arrival in that City in May, 
1776, and is the identical one on which he wrote the 
Declaration of Independence." 

" Politics, as well as Keligion," the inscription pro- 



20 ORATION. 

ceeds to say, " has its superstitions. These, gaining 
strength with time, may, one day, give imaginary 
value to this relic, for its association with the birth of 
the Great Charter of our Independence." 

Superstitions! Imaginary value! Kot for an 
instant can we admit such ideas. The modesty of 
the writer has betrayed even "the masterly pen." 
There is no imaginary value to this relic, and no 
superstition is required to render it as precious and 
priceless a piece of wood, as the secular cabinets of 
the world have ever possessed, or ever claimed to 
possess. 'No cabinet-maker on earth will have a more 
enduring name than this inscription has seciu*ed to 
" Ben Randall, of Philadelphia." ]N"o pen will have 
a wider or more lasting fame than his who wrote the 
inscription. The very table at Runny mede, which 
some of us have seen, on which the Magna Charta of 
England is said to have been signed or sealed five 
centuries and a half before, — even were it authen- 
ticated by the genuine autographs of every one of 
those brave old Barons, with Stephen Langton at 
their head, — who extorted its grand pledges and 
promises from King John, — so soon to be violated, 
— could hardly exceed, could hardly equal, in interest 
and value, this little mahogany desk. "Wliat mo- 
mentous issues for our country, and for mankind, 
were locked up in this narrow drawer, as night after 
night the rough notes of preparation for the Great 



JULY i, 1876. 21 

Paper were laid aside for the revision of the morning ! 
To what anxious thoughts, to what careful study of 
words and phrases, to what cautious weighing of 
statements and arguments, to what deep and almost 
overwhelming impressions of responsibility, it must 
have been a witness! Long may it find its appro- 
priate and appreciating ownership in the successive 
generations of a family, in which the blood of Yir- 
ginia and Massachusetts is so auspiciously com- 
mingled! Should it, in the lapse of years, ever 
l^ass from the hands of those to whom it will be so 
precious an heirloom, it could only have its fit and 
final place among the choicest and most cherished 
treasures of the N^ation, with whose Title Deeds of 
Independence it is so proudly associated ! 

But the young Jefferson is not alone from Virginia, 
on the day we are celebrating, in the Hall which we 
have entered as imaginary spectators of the scene. 
His venerated friend and old legal preceptor, — 
George Wythe, — is, indeed, temporarily absent from 
his side; and even Richard Henry Lee, the original 
mover of the measure, and upon whom it might have 
devolved to draw up the Declaration, has been called 
home by dangerous illness in his family, and is not 
there to help him. But " the gay, good-humored " 
Francis Lightfoot Lee, a younger brother, is there. 
Benjamin Harrison, the father of our late President 
Harrison, is there, and has just reported the Decla- 



22 OKATION. 

ration from the Committee of the Whole, of which 
he was Chairman. Tlie "mild and philanthropic" 
Carter Braxton is there, in the place of the lamented 
Peyton Randolph, the first President of the Con- 
tinental Congress, who had died, to the sorrow of 
the whole country, six or seven months before. And 
the noble-hearted Thomas l^elson is there, — the 
largest subscriber to the generous relief sent from 
Virginia to Boston during the sore distress oc- 
casioned by the shutting up of our Port, and who was 
the mover of those Instructions in the Convention of 
Virginia, passed on the 15th of May, under which 
Richard Henry Lee oifered the original Resolution of 
Independence, on the 7th of June. 

I am particular. Fellow Citizens, in giving to the 
Old Dominion the foremost place in this rapid survey 
of the Fourth of July, 1776, and in naming every one 
of her delegates who participated in that day's doings ; 
for it is hardly too much to say, that the destinies of 
our country, at that period, hung and hinged upon 
her action, and upon the action of her great and 
glorious sons. Without Virginia, as we must all 
acknowledge, — without her Patrick Henry among 
the people, her Lees and Jefferson in the forum, and 
her Washington in the field, — I will not say, that 
the cause of American Liberty and American In- 
dependence must have been ultimately defeated, — 
no, no; there was no ultimate defeat for that cause in 



JULY 4, 1876. 23 

the decrees of the Most High ! — but it must have 
been delayed, postponed, perplexed, and to many eyes 
and to many hearts rendered seemingly hopeless. It 
was Union which assured our Independence, and there 
could have been no Union without the influence and 
cooperation of that great leading Southern Colony. 
To-day, then, as we look back over the wide gulf of 
a century, we are ready and glad to forget every 
thing of alienation, every thing of contention and 
estrangement which has intervened, and to hail her 
once more, as our Fathers in Faneuil Hall hailed her, 
in 1775, as " our noble, patriotic sister Colony, 
Virginia." 

I may not attempt, on this occasion, to speak with 
equal particularity of all the other delegates whom we 
see assembled in that immortal Congress. Their 
names are all inscribed where they can never be oblit- 
erated, never be forgotten. Yet some others of them 
so challenge our attention and rivet our gaze, as we 
look in upon that old time-honored Hall, that I cannot 
pass to other topics without a brief allusion to them. 

Who can overlook or mistake the sturdy front of 
Roger Sherman, whom we are j^roud to recall as a 
native of Massachusetts, though now a delegate from 
Connecticut, — that "Old Puritan," as John Adams 
well said, " as honest as an angel, and as firm in the 
cause of American Independence as Mount Atlas," — 
represented most w^orthily to-day by the distinguished 



24 ORATION. 

Orator of the Centennial at Philadelphia, as well as 
by more than one distinguished grandson in our own 
State? 

Who can overlook or mistake the stalwart figure of 
Samuel Chase, of Maryland, " of ardent passions, of 
strong mind, of domineering temper, of a turbulent 
and boisterous life," who had helped to burn in effigy 
the Maryland Stamp Distributor eleven years before, 
and who, we are told by one who knew what he was 
saying, " must ever be conspicuous in the catalogue 
of that Congress " ? 

His milder and more amiable colleague, Charles 
Carroll, was engaged at that moment in pressing the 
cause of Independence on the hesitating Convention 
of Maryland, at Annapolis ; and. though, as we shall 
see, he signed the Declaration on the 2d of August, 
and outlived all his compeers on that roll of glory, he 
is missing from the illustrious band as we look in 
upon them this morning. I cannot but remember 
that it was my privilege to see and know that vener- 
able person in my early manhood. Entering his 
drawing-room, nearly five-and-forty years agt>, I 
found him reposing on a sofa and covered with a 
shawl, and was not even aware of his presence, so 
shrunk and shrivelled by the lapse of years was his 
originally feeble frame. Quot lihixis in duce summo! 
But the little heap on the sofa was soon seen stirring, 
and, rousing himself from his mid-day nap, he rose 



JULY 4, 1876. 25 

and greeted me with a courtesy and a grace which I 
can never forget. In the ninety-fifth year of his age, 
as he was, and within a few months of his death, it is 
not surprising that there should be little for me to 
recall of that interview, save his eager inquiries about 
James Madison, whom I had just visited at Montpe- 
lier, and his affectionate allusions to John Adams, who 
had gone before him; and save, too, the exceeding 
satisfaction for myself of having seen and pressed the 
hand of the last surviving signer of the Declaration. " 

But CfBsar Rodney, who had gone home on the 
same patriotic errand which had called Carroll to 
Maryland, had happily returned in season, and had 
come in, two days before, " in his boots and spurs," 
to give the casting vote foi* Delaware in favor of 
Inde23endence. 

And there is Arthur Middleton, of South Carolina, 
the bosom friend of our own Hancock, and who is 
associated with him under the same roof in those ele- 
gant hospitalities which helped to make men know 
and understand and trust each other. And with him 
you may see and almost hear the eloquent Edward 
Rutledge, who not long before had united witli 
John Adams and Kichard Henry Lee in urging on 
the several Colonies the great measure of establishing 
permanent governments at once for themselves, — a 
decisive step which we may not forget that South 
Carolina was among the very earliest in taking. She 



26 ORATION. 

took it, however, with a reservation, and her dele- 
gates were not quite ready to vote for Independence, 
when it was first proposed. 

Bnt Richard Stockton, of 'New Jersey, mnst not 
be unmarked or unmentioned in our ra^Did survey, 
more esjDecially as it is a matter of record that his 
original doubts about the measure, which he is now 
bravely supporting, had been dissipated and dispelled 
"by the irresistible and conclusive arguments of 
John Adams." 

And who requires to be reminded that our " Great 
Bostonian," Benjamin Franklin, is at his post to-day, 
representing his adopted Colony with less support 
than he could wish, — for Pennsylvania, as well as 
New York, was sadly divided, and at times almost 
paralyzed by her divisions, — but with patriotism and 
firmness and prudence and sagacity and philosophy 
and wit and common-sense and courage enough to 
constitute a whole delegation, and to represent a 
whole Colony, by himself ! He is the last man of 
that whole glorious group of Fifty, — or it may have 
been one or two more, or one or two less, than fifty, 
— who requires to be pointed out, in order to be the 
observed of all observers. 

But I must not stop here. It is fit, above all other 
things, that, while we do justice to the great actors 
in this scene from other Colonies, we should not 
overlook the delegates from our own Colony. It is 



JULY 4, 1876. 27 

fit, above all things, tliat we should recall something 
more than the names of the men who represented 
Massachusetts in that great Assembly, and who 
boldly affixed their signatures, in her behalf, to that 
immortal Instrument. 

Was there ever a more signal distinction vouch- 
safed to mortal man, than that which was won and 
worn by John Hancock a hundred years ago to-day? 
Not altogether a great man; not without some grave 
defects of character; — we remember nothing at this 
hour save his Presidency of the Congress of the 
Declaration, and his bold and noble signature to our 
Magna Charta. Behold him in the chair which is 
still standing in its old place, — the very same chair 
in which Washington was to sit, eleven years later, 
as President of the Convention which framed the 
Constitution of the United States; the very same 
chair, emblazoned on the back of which Franklin was 
to descry "a rising, and not a setting sun," when 
that Constitution had been finally adopted, — behold 
him, the young Boston merchant, not yet quite forty 
years of age, not only with a princely fortune at 
stake, but with a price at that moment on his own 
head, sitting there to-day in all the calm composure 
and dignity which so peculiarly characterized him, 
and which nothing seemed able to relax or ruffl.e. 
He had chanced to come on to the Congress during 
the previous year, just as Peyton Randolph had been 



28 1? A T I O ]!^. 

compelled to relinquish his seat and go home, — return- 
ing only to die; and, having been unexpectedly elected 
as his successor, he hesitated about taking the seat. 
But grand old Benjamin Harrison, of Virginia, we are 
told, was standing beside him, and with the ready 
good humor that loved a joke even in the Senate 
House, he seized the modest candidate in his athletic 
arms, and placed him in the presidential chair; then, 
turning to some of the members around, he ex- 
claimed: "We will show Mother Britain how little 
we care for her, by making a Massachusetts man our 
President, whom she has excluded from pardon by a 
public proclamation." 

Behold him! He has risen for a moment. He has 
put the question. The Declaration is adopted. It is 
already late in the evening, and all formal promulga- 
tion of the day's doings must be postponed. After a 
grace of three days, the air will be vibrating with the 
joyous tones of the Old Bell in the cupola over his 
head, proclaiming Liberty to all mankind, and with 
the responding acclamations of assembled multitudes. 
Meantime, for him, however, a simple but solemn 
duty remains to be discharged. The paper is before 
him. You may see the very table on which it was 
laid, and the very inkstand which awaits his use. 
'No hesitation now. He dips his pen, and with an 
nntrembling hand proceeds to execute a signature, 
which would seem to have been studied in the 



JULY 4, 1876. 29 

schools, and practised in the counting-room, and 
shaped and modelled day by day in the correspond- 
ence of mercantile and political manhood, until it 
should be meet for the authentication of some immor- 
tal act- and which, as Webster grandly said, has 
made his name as imperishable, " as if it were written 
between Orion and the Pleiades." 

Under that signature, with only the attestation of 
a secretary, the Declaration goes forth to the Ameri- 
can people, to be printed in their journals, to be 
proclaimed in their streets, to be published from their 
pulpits, to be read at the head of their armies, to be 
incorporated for ever into their history. The British 
forces, driven away from Boston, are now landing on 
Staten Island, and the reverses of Long Island are 
just awaiting us. They were met by the promulga- 
tion of this act of offence and defiance to all royal 
authority. But there was no individual responsibility 
for that act, save in the signature of John Hancoct, 
President, and Charles Thomson, Secretary. IS'ot 
until the 2d of August was our young Boston mer- 
chant relieved from the perilous, the appalling gran- 
deur of standing sole sponsor for the revolt of 
Thirteen Colonies and Three Millions of people. 
Sixteen or seventeen years before, as a very young 
man, he had made a visit to London, and was present 
at the burial of George IL, and at the coronation of 
George III. He is now not only the witness but the 



30 ORATION. 

instrument, and in some sort the impersonation, of a 
far more substantial change of dynasty on his own 
soil, the burial of royalty nnder any and every title, 
and the coronation of a Sovereign, whose sceptre has 
ah'eady endured for a century, and whose sway has 
already embraced three times thirteen States, and 
more than thirteen times three millions of people! 

Ah, if his quaint, picturesque, charming old man- 
sion-house, so long the gem of Beacon Street, could 
have stood till this day, our Centennial decorations 
and illuminations might haply have so marked, and 
sanctified, and glorified it, that the rage of recon- 
struction would have passed over it still longer, and 
spared it for the reverent gaze of other generations. 
But his own name and fame are secure ; and, what- 
ever may have been the foibles or faults of his later 
years, to-day we will remember that momentous and 
matchless signature, and him who made it, with noth- 
ing but respect, admiration and gratitude. 

But Hancock, as I need not remind you, was not 
the only proscribed patriot who represented Massa- 
chusetts at Philadelphia on the day we are commem- 
orating. His associate in General Gage's memorable 
exception from pardon is close at his side. He who, 
as a Harvard College student, in 1743, had main- 
tained the affirmative of the Thesis, " Whether it be 
lawful to resist the Supreme Magistrate, if the Com- 
monwealth cannot otherwise be preserved," and who 



JULY 4, 1876. 31 

during those whole three-aiid-thirty years since had 
been training up himself and training up his fellow- 
countrymen in the nurture and admonition of the 
Lord and of Liberty; — he who had replied to Gage's 
recommendation to him to make his peace with the 
King, "I trust I have long since made my peace with 
the King of Kings, and no personal considerations 
shall induce me to abandon the righteous cause of 
my country;" — he who had drawn up the Boston 
Instructions to her Representatives in the General 
Court, adopted at Faneuil Hall, on the 24th of May, 
1764, — the earliest protest against the Stamp Act, and 
one of the grandest papers of our whole Revolutionary 
period; — he who had instituted and organized those 
Committees of Correspondence, without which we. 
could have had no united counsels, no concerted 
action, no union, no success ; — he who, after the 
massacre of March 5, 1770, had demanded so heroic- 
ally the removal from Boston of the British regi- 
ments, ever afterwards known as " Sam. Adams's 
regiments," — telling the Governor to his face, with 
an emphasis and an eloquence which were hardly 
ever exceeded since Demosthenes stood on the Bema, 
or Paul on Mars Hill, " If the Lieutenant-governor, or 
Colonel Dalrymple, or both together, have authority 
to remove one regiment, they have authority to 
remove two; and nothing short of the total evacua- 
tion of the Town, by all the regular troops, will 



32 ORATION. 

satisfy the public mind or preserve the peace of the 
Province;" — he, "the PaUnurus of the American 
Revohition," as Jefferson once called him, but — 
thank Heaven ! — a Palinurus who was never put to 
sleep at the helm, never thrown into the sea, but who 
is still watching the compass and the stars, and steer- 
ing the ship as she enters at last the haven he has so 
long yearned for: — the veteran Samuel Adams, — 
the disinterested, inflexible, incorruptible statesman, 
— is second to no one in that whole Congress, hardly 
second to any one in the whole thirteen Colonies, in 
his claim to the honors and grateful acknowledg- 
ments of this hour. We have just gladly hailed his 
statue on its way to the capitol. 

ISlor must the name of Robert Treat Paine be 
forgotten among the five delegates of Massachusetts 
in that Hall of Independence, a hundred years ago 
to-day; — an able lawyer, a learned judge, a just 
man; connected by marriage, if I mistake not, Mr. 
Mayor, with your own gallant grandfather, General 
Cobb, and who himself inherited the blood and illus- 
trated the virtues of the hero and statesman whose 
name he bore, — Robert Treat, a most distinguished 
officer in King Philip's War, and afterwards a worthy 
Governor of Connecticut. 

And with him, too, is Elbridge Gerry, the very 
youngest member of the whole Continental Congress, 
just thirty-two years of age, — who had been one of 



JULY 4, 1876. 33 

the chosen friends of our proto-martyr, General 
Joseph Warren; who was with Warren, at Water- 
town, the very last night before he fell at Bunker 
Hill, and into whose ear that heroic volunteer had 
whispered those memorable words of presentiment, 
"Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori;" who lived 
himself to serve his Commonwealth and the Nation, 
ardently and efficiently, at home and abroad, ever in 
accordance with his own patriotic injunction, — "It 
is the duty of every citizen, though he may have but 
one day to live, to devote that day to the service of 
his country," — and died on his way to his post as 
Vice-President of the United States. 

One more name is still to be pronounced. One 
more star of that little Massachusetts cluster is still 
to be observed and noted. And it is one, which, on 
the precise occasion we commemorate, — one, which 
during those great days of June and July, 1776, on 
which the question of Independence was immediately 
discussed and decided, — had hardly " a fellow in the 
firmament," and which was certainly "the bright, 
particular star " of our own constelktion. You will 
all have anticipated me in naming John Adams. 
Beyond all doubt, his is the Massachusetts name 
most prominently associated with the immediate Day 
we celebrate. 

Others may have been earlier or more active than 
he in preparing the way. Others may have labored 



34 oratio:p^. 

longer and more zealously to instruct the popular 
mind and inflame the popular heart for the great step 
which was now to be taken. Others may have been 
more ardent, as they unquestionably were more 
prominent, in the various stages of the struggle 
against Writs of Assistance, and Stamp Acts, and 
Tea Taxes. But from the date of that marvellous 
letter of his to JN^athan Webb, in 1755, when he was 
less than twenty years old, he seems to have forecast 
the destinies of this continent as few other men of 
any age, at that day, had done; while from the 
moment at which the Continental Congress took the 
question of Independence fairly in hand, as a question 
to be decided and acted on, until they had brought it 
to its final issue in the Declaration, his was the voice, 
above and before all other voices, which commanded 
the ears, convinced the minds, and inspired the hearts 
of his colleagues, and triumphantly secured the 
result. 

I need not speak of him in other relations or in 
after years. His long life of varied and noble service 
to his country, in almost every sphere of public duty, 
domestic and foreign, belongs to history; and history 
has long ago taken it in charge. But the testimony 
which was borne to his grand effoils and utterances, 
by the author of the Declaration himself, can never 
be gainsaid, never be weakened, never be forgotten. 
That testimony, old as it is, familiar as it is, belongs 



JULY 4, 1876. 35 

to this day. John Adams will be remembered and 
honored for ever, in every true American heart, as 
the acknowledged Champion of Independence in the 
Continental Congress, — " coming out with a power 
which moved us from our seats," — " our Colossus on 
the floor." 

And when we recall the circumstances of his 
death, — the year, the day, the hour, — and the last 
words upon his dying lips, " Independence for ever," 
— who can help feeling that there was some myste- 
rious tie holding back his heroic spirit from the skies, 
until it should be set free amid the exulting shouts of 
his country's first ISTational Jubilee! 

But not his heroic spirit alone! 

In this rapid survey of the men assembled at 
Philadelphia a hundred years ago to-day, I began 
with Thomas Jefferson, of Virginia, and I end with 
John Adams, of Massachusetts; and no one can 
hesitate to admit that, under God, they were the very 
alpha and omega of that day's doings, — the pen and 
the tongue, — the masterly author, and the no less 
masterly advocate, of the Declaration. 

And now, my friends, what legend of ancient 
Rome, or Greece, or Egypt, what myth of prehistoric 
mythology, what story of Herodotus, or fable of 
^sop, or metamorphosis of Ovid, would have seemed 
more fabulous and mythical, — did it rest on any 
remote or doubtful tradition, and had not so many of 



36 ORATION. 

US lived to be startled, and thrilled and awed by it, — 
than the fact, that' these two men, under so many 
difterent circnmstances and surroundings, of age and 
constitution and climate, widely distant from each 
other, living alike in quiet neighborhoods, remote 
from the smoke and stir of cities, and long before 
railroads or telegraphs had made any advances 
towards the annihilation or abridgment of space, 
should have been released to their rest and sum- 
moned to the skies, not only on the same day, but 
that day the Fourth of July, and that Fourth of July 
the Fiftieth Anniversary of that great Declaration 
which they had contended for and carried through 
so trimnphantly side by side! 

What an added emphasis Jefferson would have 
given to his inscription on this little desk, — " Poli- 
tics, as well as Religion, has its superstitions," — 
could he have foreseen the close even of his own life, 
much more the simultaneous close of these two lives, 
on that Day of days ! Oh, let me not admit the idea 
of superstition! Let me rather reverently say, as 
Webster said at the time, in that magnificent Eulogy 
which left so little for any one else to say as to the 
lives or deaths of Adams and Jefferson : " As their 
lives themselves were the gifts of Providence, who is 
not willing to recognize in their happy termination, 
as well as in their long continuance, proofs that our 
country and its benefactors are objects of His care?" 



JULY -4, 1876. 37 

And now another Fifty Years have passed away, 
and we are holdmg our high Centennial Festival; and 
still that most striking, most impressive, most memor- 
able coincidence in all American history, or even in 
the authentic records of mankind, is without a visible 
monument anywhere! 

In the interesting little city of Weimar, renowned 
as the resort and residence of more than one of the 
greatest philosophers and poets of Germany, many a 
traveller must have seen and admired the charming 
statues of Goethe and Schiller, standing side by side 
and hand in hand, on a single pedestal, and oflPering, 
as it were, the laurel wreath of literary priority or 
pre-eminence to each other. Few nobler works of 
art, in conception or execution, can be found on the 
Continent of Europe. And what could be a worthier 
or juster commemoration of the marvellous coinci- 
dence of which I have just spoken, and of the men 
who were the subjects of it, and of the Declaration 
with which, alike in their lives and in their deaths, 
they are so peculiarly and so signally associated, 
than just such a Monnment, with the statues of 
Adams and Jeflerson, side by side and hand in hand, 
upon the same base, pressing upon each other, in 
mutual acknowledgment and deference, the victor 
palm of a triumph for which they must ever be held 
in common and equal honor! It would be a new tie 
between Massachusetts and Yirginia. It would be a 



38 ORATION. 

new bond of that Union which is the safety and the 
glory of both. It would be a new pledge of that 
restored good-will between the JSTorth and South, 
which is the herald and harbinger of a Second Cen- 
tury of ISTational Independence. It would be a fit 
recognition of the great Hand of God in our history I 
At all events, it is one of the crying omissions 
and neglects which reproach us all this day, that 
" glorious old John Adams " is without any propor- 
tionate public monument in the State of which he was 
one of the very grandest citizens and sons, and in 
whose behalf he rendered such inestimable services to 
his country. It is almost ludicrous to look around 
and see who has been commemorated, and he neg- 
lected! He might be seen standing alone, as he 
knew so well how to stand alone in life. He might 
be seen grouped with his illustrious son, only second 
to himself in his claims on the omitted posthumous 
honors of his native State. Or, if the claim of noble 
women to such commemorations were ever to be 
recognized on our soil, he might be lovingly grouped 
with that incomparable wife, from whom he was so 
often separated by public duties and personal dangers, 
and whose familiar correspondence with him, and his 
with her, furnishes a picture of fidelity and affection, 
and of patriotic zeal and courage and self-sacrifice, 
almost without a parallel in our Revolutionary 
Annals. 



JULY 4, 1876. 39 

But before all other statues, let us have those of 
Adams and Jefferson on a single block, as they stood 
together just a hundred years ago to-day, — as they 
were translated together just fifty years ago to-day: 
— foremost for Independence in their lives, and in 
their deaths not divided! IS^ext, certainly, to the 
completion of the ^National Monument to Washington, 
at the Capital, this double statue of this " double 
star " of the Declaration calls for the contributions of 
a patriotic people. It would have something of 
special appropriateness as the first gift to that Boston 
Park, which is to date from this Centennial Period. 

I have felt, Mr. Mayor and Fellow Citizens, as I 
am sure you all must feel, that the men who were 
gathered at Philadelphia a hundred years ago to-day, 
familiar as their names and their story may be, to 
ourselves and to all the world, had an imperative 
claim to the first and highest honors of this Centen- 
nial Anniversary. But, having paid these passing 
tributes to their memory, I hasten to turn to consid- 
erations less purely personal. 

The Declaration has been adopted, and has been 
sent forth in a hundred journals, and on a thousand 
broadsides, to every camp and council chamber, to 
every town and village and hamlet and fireside, 
throughout the Colonies. What was it? What did 
it declare? What was its rightful interpretation 



40 ORATION. 

and intention? Under what circumstances was it 
adopted? Wliat did it accomplish for ourselves and 
for mankind? 

A recent and powerful writer on " The Growth of 
the English Constitution," whom I had the pleasure 
of meeting at the Commencement of Old Cambridge 
University two years ago, says most strikingly and 
most justly: "There are certain great political docu- 
ments, each of which forms a landmark in our politi- 
cal history. There is the Great Charter, The Petition 
of Rights, the Bill of Eights." " But not one of 
them," he adds, " gave itself out as the enactment of 
any thing new. All claimed to set forth, with new 
strength, it might be, and with new clearness, those 
rights of Englishmen, which wxre already old." The 
same remark has more recently been incorporated 
into " A Short History of the English People." " In 
itself," says the writer of that admirable little volume, 
" the Charter was no novelty, nor did it claim to 
establish any new Constitutional principles. The 
Charter of Henry I. formed the basis of the whole; 
and the additions to it are, for the most part, formal 
recognitions of the judicial and administrative changes 
introduced by Henry H." 

So, substantially, — so, almost precisely, — it may 
be said of the Great American Charter, which was 
drawn up by Thomas Jefferson on the ♦precious little 
desk which lies before me. It made no pretensions 



JULY 4, 1876. 41 

to novelty. The men of 1776 were not in any sense, 
certainly not in any seditious sense, greedy of novel- 
ties, — " avidi novarum rerumP They had claimed 
nothing new. They desired nothing new. Their old 
original rights as Englishmen were all that they 
sought to enjoy, and those they resolved to vindicate. 
It was the invasion and denial of those old rights of 
Englishmen, which they resisted and revolted from. 

As our excellent fellow-citizen, Mr. Dana, so well 
said publicly at Lexington, last year, — and as we 
should all have been glad to have him in the way of 
repeating quietly in London, this year, — "We were 
not the Revolutionists. The King and Parliament 
were the Kevolntionists. They were the radical 
innovators. We were the conservators of existing 
institutions." 

]^o one has forgotten, or can ever forget, how 
early and how emphatically all this was admitted by 
some of the grandest statesmen and orators of 
England herself. It was the attempt to subvert our 
rights as Englishmen, which roused Chatham to some 
of his most majestic efforts. It was the attempt to 
subvert our rights as Englishmen, which kindled 
Burke to not a few of his most brilliant utterances. 
It was the attempt to subvert our rights as English- 
men, which inspired Barre and Conway and Camden 
with appeals and arguments and phrases, which will 
keep their memories fresh when all else associated 



42 ORATION. 

with them is forgotten. The names of all three of 
them, as you well know, have long been the cherished 
designations of American Towns. 

They all perceived and understood that we were 
contending for English rights, and against the viola- 
tion of the great principles of Enghsh liberty. Nay, 
not a few of them perceived and understood that we 
were fighting their battles as well as our own, and 
that the liberties of Englishmen upon their own soil 
were virtually involved in our cause and in our 
contest. 

There is a most notable letter of Josiah Quincy, 
Jr.'s, written from London at the end of 1774, — a 
few months only before that young patriot returned 
to die so sadly within sight of his native shores, — in 
which he tells his wife, to whom he was not likely to 
write for any mere sensational effect, that " some of 
the first characters for understanding, integrity, and 
spirit," whom he had met in London, had used lan- 
guage of this sort : " This Nation is lost. Corruj^tion 
and the influence of the Crown have led us into 
bondage, and a Standing Army has riveted our 
chains. To America only can we look for salvation. 
'Tis America only can save England. Unite and 
persevere. You must prevail — you must triumph." 
Quincy was careful not to betray names, in a letter 
which might be intercepted before it reached its 
destination. But we know the men with whom he 



JULY 4, 1876. 43 

had been brought into association by Franklin and 
other friends, — men like Shelbnrne and Hartley 
and Pownall and Priestley and Brand Hollis and Sir 
George Saville, to say nothing of Burke and Chat- 
ham. The language was not lost upon us. AYe did 
unite and persevere. We did prevail and triumph. 
And it is hardly too much to say that we did ''' save 
England." We saved her from herself; — saved her 
from being the successful instrument of overthrowing 
the rights of Englishmen ; — saved her " from the 
poisoned chalice which would have been commended 
to her own lips;" — saved her from " the bloody 
instructions which would have returned to plague the 
inventor." ]S^ot only was it true, as Lord Macaulay 
said in one of his brilliant Essays, that "England 
was never so rich, so gi'eat, so formidable to foreign 
princes, so absolutely mistress of the seas, as since 
the alienation of her American Colonies ; " but it is 
not less true that England came out of that contest 
with new and larger views of Liberty; with a 
broader and deeper sense of what was due to human 
rights; and with an experience of incalculable value 
to her in the management of the vast Colonial Sys- 
tem which remained, or was in store, for her. 

A vast and gigantic Colonial System, beyond 
doubt, it has proved to be! She was just entering, a 
hundred years ago, on that wonderful career of con- 
quest in the East, which was to compensate her, — 



44 ORATION. 

if it were a compensation, — for iier impending losses 
in the West. Her gallant Cornwallis was soon to 
receive the jewelled sword of Tippoo Saib at Ban- 
galore, in exchange for that which he was now des- 
tined to surrender to Washington at Yorktown. It 
is certainly not among the least striking coincidences 
of onr Centennial Year, that, at the very moment 
when we are celebrating the event which stripped 
Great Britain of thirteen Colonies and three millions 
of subjects, — now grown into thirty-eight States and 
more than forty millions of people, — she is welcom- 
ing the return of her amiable and genial Prince from 
a royal progress through the wide-spread regions of 
" Ormus and of Ind," bringing back, to lay at the 
foot of the British throne, the homage of nine prin- 
cipal Provinces and a hundred and forty-eight 
feudatory States, and of not less than two hundred 
and forty millions of people, from Ceylon to the 
Himalayas, and affording ample justification for the 
Queen's new title of Empi-ess of India! Among all 
the parallelisms of modern history, there are few 
more striking and impressive than this. 

The American Colonies never quarrelled or cav- 
illed about the titles of their Sovereign. If, as has 
been said, " they went to war about a preamble," it 
was not about the preamble of the royal name. It 
was the Imperial power, the more than Imperial pre- 
tensions and usurpations, which drove them to 



JULY 4, 1876. 45 

rebellion. The Declaration was, in its own terms, a 
personal and most stringent arraignment of the 
King. It conlcl have been nothing else. George 
III. was to ns the sole responsible instrument of 
oppression. Parliament had, indeed, sustained him; 
but the Colonies had never admitted the authority of 
a Parliament in which they had no representation. 
There is no passage in Mr. Jefferson's paper more 
carefully or more felicitously worded, than that in 
which he says of the Sovereign, that "he has com- 
bined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction for- 
eign to our constitutions and unacknowledged by 
our laws, — giving his assent to their acts of pre- 
tended legislation.'''' A slip of " the masterly pen " 
on this point might have cost us our consistency; 
but that pen was on its guard, and this is the only 
allusion to Lords or Commons. We could recognize 
no one but the Monarch. We could contend with 
nothing less than Royalty. We could separate our- 
selves only from the Crown. English precedents 
had abundantly taught us that kings were not 
beyond the reach of arraignment and indictment; 
and arraignment and indictment were then our only 
means of justifying our cause to ourselves and to the 
world. Yes; harsh, severe, stinging, scolding, — I 
had almost said, — as that long series of allegations 
and accusations may sound, and certainly does 
sound, as we read it, or listen to it, in cold blood, a 



46 ORATION. 

century after the issues are all hapj^ily settled, it was 
a temperate and a dignified utterance under the cir- 
cumstances of the case, and breathed quite enough 
of moderation to be relished or accepted by those 
who were bearing the brunt of so terrible a struggle 
for life and liberty and all that was dear to them, as 
that which those issues involved. Nor in all that 
bitter indictment is there a single count which does 
not refer to, and rest upon, some violation of the 
rights of Englishmen, or some violation of the rights 
of humanity. We stand by the Declaration to-day, 
and always, and disavow nothing of its reasoning or 
its rhetoric. 

And, after all, Jefferson was not a whit more 
severe on the King than Chatham had been on the 
King's Ministers six months before, when he told 
them to their faces : " The whole of your polit- 
ical conduct has been one continued series of 
weakness, temerity, despotism, ignorance, futility, 
negligence, blundering, and the most notorious ser- 
vility, incapacity, and corruption." JN^or was Wil- 
liam Pitt, the younger, much more measured in his 
language, at a later period of our struggle, when he 
declared: "These Ministers will destroy the empire 
they were called upon to save, before the indignation 
of a great and suffering people can fall upon their 
heads in the punishment which they deserve. I 
affirm the war to have been a most accursed, wicked. 



JULY 4, 1876. 47 

barbarous, cruel, unnatural, unjust, and diabolical 
war." 

I need not say. Fellow Citizens, that we are here 
to indulge in no reproaches upon Old England to- 
day, as we look back from the lofty height of a Cen- 
tury of Independence on the course of events which 
severed us from her dominions. We are by no 
means in the mood to re-open the adjudications of 
Ghent or of Geneva; nor can we allow the ties of 
old traditions to be seriously jarred, on such an 
occasion as this, by any recent failures of extradi- 
tions, however vexatious or provoking. But, cer- 
tainly, resentments on either side, for any thing said 
or done during our Revolutionary period, — after 
such a lapse of time, — would dishonor the hearts 
which cherished them, and the tongues which ut- 
tered them. Who wonders that George the Third 
would not let -such Colonies as ours go without a 
struggle? They were the brightest jewels of his 
crown. Who wonders that he shrunk from the 
responsibility of such a dismemberment of his em- 
pire, and that his brain reeled at the very thought of 
it? It would have been a poor compliment to us, 
had he not considered us worth holding at any and 
every cost. We should hardly have forgiven him, 
had he not desired to retain us. I^oy can we alto- 
gether wonder, that with the views of kingly pre- 
rogative which belonged to that period, and in which 



48 OKATION. 

he was educated, he should have preferred the pohcy 
of coercion to that of conciHation, and should have 
insisted on sending over troops to subdue us. 

Our old Mother Country has had, indeed, a pe- 
culiar destiny, and in many respects a glorious one. 
ISTot alone with her drum-beat, as Webster so 
grandly said, has she encircled the earth. ISTot alone 
with her martial airs has she kept company with the 
hours. She has carried civilization and Christianity 
wherever she has carried her flag. She has carried 
her noble tongue, with all its incomparable treasures 
of literature and science and religion, around the 
globe ; and, with our aid, — for she will confess that 
we are doing our full part in this line of extension, 
— it is fast becoming the most pervading speech of 
civilized man. We thank God at this hour, and 
at every hour, that " Chatham's language is our 
mother tongue," and that we have an inherited and 
an indisputable share in the glory of so many of 
the great names by which that language has been 
illustrated and adorned. 

But she has done more than all this. She has 
planted the great institutions and principles of civil 
freedom in every latitude where she could find a 
foothold. From her our Revolutionary Fathers 
learned to understand and value them, and from her 
they inherited the spirit to defend them. 'Not in 
vain had her brave barons extorted Magna Charta 



JULY 4, 1876. 49 

from King John. Not in vain had her Simon de 
Montfort summoned the knights and burgesses, and 
laid the foundations of a Parliament and a House 
of Commons. I^ot in vain had her noble Sir 
John Eliot died, as the martyr of free speech, in 
the Tower. ]!!^ot in vain had her heroic Hampden 
resisted ship-money, and died on the battle-field. 
'Not in vain for us, certainly, the great examples and 
the great warnings of Cromwell and the Common- 
wealth, or those sadder ones of Sidney and Russell, 
or that later and more glorious one still of William 
of Orange. 

The grand lessons of her own history, forgotten, 
overlooked, or resolutely disregarded, it may be, on 
her own side of the Atlantic, in the days we are 
commemorating, were the very inspiration of her 
Colonies on this side; and under that inspiration 
they contended and conquered. And though she 
may sometimes be almost tempted to take sadly upon 
her lips the words of the old prophet, — "I have 
nourished and brought up children, and they have 
rebelled against me," — she has long ago learned 
that such a rebellion as ours was really in her own 
interest, and for her own ultimate welfare; begun, 
continued, and ended, as it was, in vindication of the 
liberties of Englishmen. 

I cannot forget how justly and eloqilently my 
friend, Dr. ElHs, a few months ago, in this same 



50 OKATION. 

hall, gave expression to the respect which is so 
widely entertained on this side of the Atlantic for 
the Sovereign Lady who has now graced the British 
throne for nearly forty years, l^o j)assage of his 
admirable Oration elicited a warmer response from 
the multitudes who listened to him. How much of 
the growth and grandeur of Great Britain is asso- 
ciated with the names of illustrious women! Even 
those of us who have no fancy for female suffrage 
might often be well-nigh tempted to take refuge, 
from the incompetencies and intrigues and corrup- 
tions of men, under the j)residency of the purer and 
gentler sex. What would English history be with- 
out the names of Elizabeth and Anne ! What would 
it be without the name of Victoria, — of whom it 
has recently been written, " that, by a long course of 
loyal acquiescence in the declared wishes of her 
13eople, she has brought about what is nothing less 
than a great Revolution, — all the more beneficent 
because it has been gradual and silent!" Ever 
honored be her name, and that of her lamented 
consort ! 

" Ever beloved and loving may her rule be ; 
And when old Time shall lead her to her end, 
Goodness and she fill up one monument ! " 

The Declaration is adopted and promulgated; but 
we may not forget how long and how serious a re- 



JULY 4, 1876. 51 

Inctance there had been to take the irrevocable step. 
As late as September, 1774, Washuigtoii had pub- 
licly declared his belief that Independence " was 
wished by no thinking man." As late as the 6th of 
March, 1775, in his memorable Oration in the Old 
South, with all the associations of " the Boston 
Massacre " fresh in his heart, Warren had declared 
that " Independence was not our aim." As late as 
July, 1775, the letter of the Continental Congress to 
the Lord Mayor and Corporation of London had 
said : " JS^orth America, my Lord, wishes most ar- 
dently for a lasting connection with Great Britain, on 
terms of jnst and equal liberty; " and a simultaneous 
humble petition to the King, signed by every mem- 
ber of the Congress, reiterated the same assurance. 
And as late as the 25th of August, 1775, JeflPerson 
himself, in a letter to the John Randolph of that 
day, speaking of those who " still wish for reunion 
with their parent country," says most emphatically, 
" I am one of those; and would rather be in depend- 
ence on Great Britain, properly limited, than on 
any nation on earth, or than on no nation." ^ot all 
the blood of Lexington, and Concord, and Bunker 
Hill, crying from the ground long before these 
words were written, had extinguished the wish for 
reconciliation and reunion even in the heart of the 
very author of the Declaration. 

Tell me not, tell me not, that there was any thing 



52 ORATION. 

of equivocation, any thing of hypocrisy, in these and 
a hundred other similar expressions which might be 
cited. The truest human hearts are full of such 
inconsistency and hypocrisy as that. The dearest 
friends, the tenderest relatives, are never more over- 
flowing and outpouring, nor ever more sincere, in 
feelings and expressions of devotion and love, than 
when called to contemplate some terrible impending 
necessity of final separation and divorce. The ties 
between us and Old England could not be sundered 
without sadness, and sadness on both sides of the 
ocean. Franklin, albeit his eyes were " unused to 
the melting mood," is recorded to have wept as he 
left England, in view of the inevitable result of 
which he was coming home to be a witness and an 
instrument; and I have heard from the poet Kogers's 
own lips, what many of you may have read in his 
Table-Talk, how deeply he was impressed, as a boy, 
by his father's putting on a mourning suit, when 
he heard of the first shedding of American blood. 

]!!^or could it, in the nature of things, have been 
only their warm and undoubted attachment to Eng- 
land, which made so many of the men of 1776 
reluctant to the last to cross the Rubicon. They 
saw clearly before them, they could not help seeing, 
the full proportions, the tremendous odds, of the 
contest into which the Colonies must be plunged by 
such a step. Think you that no apprehensions and 



JULY 4, 1876. 53 

anxieties weighed heavily on the minds and hearts of 
those far-seeing men? Think you that as their 
names were called on the day we commemorate, be- 
ginning with Josiah Bartlett, of ^ew Hampshire, — 
or as, one by one, they approached the Secretary's 
desk on the following 2d of August, to write their 
names on that now hallowed parchment, — they did 
not realize the full responsibility, and the full risk to 
their country and to themselves, which such a vote 
and such a signature involved? They sat, indeed, 
with closed doors; and it is only from traditions or* 
eaves-droppings, or from the casual expressions of 
diaries or letters, that we catch glimpses of what 
was done, or gleanings of what was said. But 
how full of imj)ort are some of those glimpses and 
gleanings! 

" Will you sign ? " said Hancock to Charles Car- 
roll, who, as we have seen, had not been present on 
the dth of July. " Most willingly," was the reply. 
" There goes two millions with a dash of the pen," 
says one of those standing by; while another re- 
marks, " Oh, Carroll, you will get off, there are so 
many Charles Carrolls." And then we may see him 
stepping back to the desk, and putting that addition 
— "of Carrollton " — to his name, which will desig- 
nate him for ever, and be a prouder title of nobility 
than those in the peerage of Great Britain, which 



54 OKATION. 

were afterwards adorned by his accomplished and 
fascinating grand-daughters. 

"We must stand by each other — we must hang 
together," — is presently heard from some one of the 
signers; with the instant reply, "Yes, we must hang 
together, or we shall assuredly hang separately." 
And, on this suggestion, the portly and humorous 
Benj. Harrison, whom we have seen forcing Hancock 
into the Chair, may be heard bantering our spare and 
slender Elbridge Gerry, — levity provoking levity, — 
and telling him with grim mei'riment that, when that 
hanging scene arrives, he shall have the advantage: — 
" It will be all over with me in a moment, but you 
will be kicking in the air half an hour after I am 
gone ! " These • are among the " asides " of the 
drama, but, I need not say, they more than make up 
in significance for all they may seem to lack in 
dignity. 

The excellent William EUery, of Khode Island, 

« 

whose name was afterwards borne by his grandson, 
our revered Channing, often spoke, we are told, of 
the scene of the signing, and spoke of it as an event 
which many regarded with awe, perhaps with uncer- 
tainty, but none with fear. " I was determined," he 
used to say, " to see how all looked, as they signed 
what might be their death warrant. I placed myself 
beside the Secretary, Charles Thomson, and eyed 
each closely as l>e affixed his name to the document. 



JULY 4, 1876. 55 

Undaunted resolution was displayed in every coun- 
tenance." 

" You inquire," wrote John Adams to William 
Plumer, " whether every member of Congress did, 
on the 4th of July, 1776, in fact, cordially approve of 
the Declaration of Independence. They who were 
then members all signed it, and, as I could not see 
their hearts, it would be hard for me to say that they 
did not approve it; but, as far as I could penetrate 
the intricate internal foldings of their souls, I then 
believed, and have not since altered my opinion, that 
there were sevei'al who signed with regret, and 
several others with many doubts and much luke- 
warmness. The measure had been on the carpet for 
months, and obstinately opposed fi'om day to day. 
Majorities were constantly against it. For many 
days the majority depended upon Mr. Hewes of 
!North Carolina. While a member one day was 
speaking, and reading documents from all the Colo- 
nies to prove that the public oj^inion, the general 
sense of all, was in favor of the measure, when he 
came to ^orth Carolina, and produced letters and 
public proceedings which demonstrated that the 
majority of that Colony were in favor of it, Mr. 
Hewes, who had hitherto constantly voted against it, 
started suddenly upright, and lifting up both his 
hands to Heaven, as if he had been in a trance, cried 
out, ' It is done, and I will abide by it.' I would 



56 ORATION^. 

give more for a perfect painting of the terror and 
horror upon the faces of the old majority, at that 
critical moment, than for the best piece of Raphael." 

There is quite enough in these traditions and hear- 
says, in these glimpses and gleanings, to show us 
that the supporters and signers of the Declaration 
were not blind to the responsibilities and hazards in 
which they were involving themselves and the coun- 
try. There is quite enough, certainly, in these and 
other indications, to give color and credit to what I 
so well remember hearing the late Mr. Justice Story 
say, half a century ago, that, as the result of all his 
conversations with the great men of the Revolution- 
ary Period, — and especially with his illustrious and 
venerated chief on the bench of the Supreme Court 
of the United States, John Marshall, — he was con- 
vinced that a majority of the Continental Congress 
was opposed to the Declaration, and that it was car- 
ried through by the patient, persistent, and over- 
whelming efforts and arguments of the minority. 

Two of those arguments, as Mr. Jefferson has left 
them on record, were enough for that occasion, or 
certainly are enough for this. 

One of the two was, " That the people wait for us 
to lead the way; that they are in favor of the meas- 
ure, though the instructions given by some of their 
representatives are not." And most true, indeed, it 
was, my friends, at that day, as it often has been 



JULY 4, 1876. 57 

since that day, that the people were ahead of their 
so-called leaders. The minds of the masses were 
made up. They had no doubts or misgivings. They 
demanded that Independence should be recognized 
and proclaimed. John Adams knew how to keep up 
with them. Sam. Adams had kept his finger on 
their pulse from the beginning, and had "marked 
time " for every one of their advancing steps. Pat- 
rick Henry and Richard Henry Lee and Thomas 
Jefferson, and some other ardent and noble spirits, 
were by no means behind them. But not a few of 
the leaders were, in fact, only followers. " The peo- 
ple waited for them to lead the way." Independence 
was the resolve and the act of the American people, 
and the American people gladly received, and enthu- 
siastically ratified, and heroically sustained the Dec- 
laration, until Independence was no longer a question 
either at home or abroad. Yes, our Great Charter, 
as we fondly call it, though with something, it must 
be confessed, of poetic or patriotic license, was no 
temporizing concession, wrung by menaces from 
reluctant Monarchs; but was the spontaneous and 
imperative dictate of a ISTation resolved to be free ! 

The other of those two arguments was even more 
conclusive and more chnching. It was, " That the 
question was not whether by a Declaration of Inde- 
pendence we should make ourselves what we are 



58 OKATION. 

not, but whether we should declare a fact which 
aleady exists." 

" A fact which already exists ! " Mr. Mayor and 
Fellow Citizens, there is no more interesting histori- 
cal truth to us of Boston than this. Our hearts are 
all at Philadelphia to-day, as I have already said, 
rejoicing in all that is there said and done in honor 
of the men who made this day immortal, and hailing 
it, with our fellow-countrymen, from ocean to ocean, 
and from the lakes to the gulf, as our National 
Birthday. And nobly has Philadelphia met the 
requisitions, and more than fulfilled the expectations, 
of the occasion; furnishing a fete and a pageant of 
which the whole IN^ation is proud. Yet we are not 
called on to forget, — we could not be pardoned, 
indeed, for not remembering, — that, while the Dec- 
laration was boldly and grandly made in that hal- 
lowed Pennsylvania Hall, Independence had already 
been won, — and won here in Massachusetts. It was 
said by some one of the old patriots, — John Adams, 
I believe, — that " the Revolution was effected before 
the war commenced ; " and Jefferson is now our 
authority for the assertion that "Independence ex- 
isted before it was declared." They both well knew 
what they were talking about. Congresses in Car- 
penters' Hall, and Congresses in the old Pennsyl- 
vania State House, did grand things and wei-e 
composed of grand men, and we render to their 



JULY 4, 1876. 59 

memories all the homage and all the glory which 
they so richly earned. But here in Boston, the capi- 
tal of Massachusetts, and the principal town of 
British IS^orth America at that day, the question had 
already been brought to an issue, and already been 
irrevocably decided: Here the manifest destiny of 
the Colonies had been recognized and accepted. It 
was upon us, as all the world knows, that the blows 
of British oppression fell first and fell heaviest, — 
fell like a storm of hail-stones and coals of fire; and 
where they fell, and as soon as they fell, they 
were resisted, and successfully resisted. 

Why, away back in 1761, when George the Third 
had been but a year on his throne, and when the 
printer's ink on the pages of our Harvard " Pietas 
et Gratulatio" was hardly dry; when the Seven 
Years' War was still unfinished, in which 'New 
England had done her full share of the fighting, and 
reaped her full share of the glory, and when the 
British flag, by the help of her men and money, was 
just floating in triumph over the whole American 
continent, — a mad resolution had been adopted to 
reconstruct — Oh, word of ill-omen! — -the whole 
Colonial system, and to bring America into closer 
conformity and subjection to. the laws of the Mother 
Country. A Revenue is to be collected here. A 
Standing Army is to be established here. The N^av- 
igation Act and Acts of Trade are to bo enforced 



60 OEATION^. 

and executed here. And all without any representa- 
tion on our part. — The first practical step in this 
direction is taken. A custom-house officer, named 
Cockle, applies to the Superior Court at Salem for a 
writ of assistance. That cockle-shell exploded like 
dynamite! The Court postpones the case, and 
orders its argument in Boston. And then and there, 
— in 1761, in our Old Town House, afterwards 
known as the Old State House, — alas, alas, that it 
is thought necessary to talk about removing or even 
reconstructing it ! — James Otis, as John Adams 
himself tells us, " breathed into this nation the breath 
of life." " Then and there," he adds, and he spoke 
of what he witnessed and heard, " then and there 
the child Independence was born. In fifteen years, 
i. e., in 1776, he grew up to manhood, and declared 
himself free." 

The next year finds the same great scholar and 
orator exposing himself to the cry of " treason " in 
denouncing the idea of taxation without representa- 
tion, and forthwith vindicating himself in a masterly 
pamphlet which excited the admiration and sympathy 
of the whole people. 

Another year brings the first instalment of the 
scheme for raising a revenue in the Colonies, — in 
the shape of declaratory resolves; and Otis meets it 
plumply and boldly, in Faneuil Hall, — at that 
moment freshly rebuilt and reopened, — with the 



JULY 4, 1876. 61 

counter declaration that "every British subject in 
America is, of common right, by act of Parliament, 
and by the laws of God and Nature, entitled to all 
the essential privileges of Britons." 

And now George Grenville has devised and pro- 
posed the Stamp Act. And, before it is even 
known that the Bill had passed, Samuel Adams is 
heard reading, in that same Faneuil Hall, at the May 
meeting of 1764, those memorable instructions from 
Boston to her representatives: "There is no room 
for delay. If taxes are laid upon us in any shape 
without our having a legal representation where they 
are laid, are we not reduced from the character of 
fi'ee subjects to the miserable state of tributary 
slaves? . . . We claim British rights, not by 
charter only; we are born to them. Use your en- 
deavors that the weight of the other Korth American 
Colonies may be added to that of this Province, that 
by united application all may happily obtain redress." 
Redress and Union — and union as the means, and 
the only means of redress — had thus early become 
the doctrine of our Boston leaders ; and James Otis 
follows out that doctrine, without a moment's 
delay, in another brilliant plea for the rights of the 
Colonies. 

The next year finds the pen of John Adams in 
motion, in a powerful communication to the public 
journals, setting forth distinctly, that " there seems 



62 OEATION. 

to be a direct and formal design on foot in Great 
Britain to enslave all America; " .and adding most 
ominously those emphatic words: "Be it remem- 
bered, Liberty must be defended at all hazards ! " 

And, I need not say, it was remembered; and 
Liberty was defended, at all hazards, here upon our 
own soil. 

Ten long years, however, are still to elapse before 
the wager of battle is to be fully joined. The stir- 
ring events which crowded those years, and which 
have been so vividly depicted by Sparks and Ban- 
croft and Frothingham, — to name no others, — are 
too familiar for repetition or reference. Virginia, 
through the clarion voice of Patrick Henry, nobly 
sustained by her House of Burgesses, leads off in 
the grand remonstrance. Massachusetts, through 
the trumpet tones of James Otis, rouses the whole 
Continent by a demand for a General Congress. 
South Carolina, through the influence of Christopher 
Gadsden, responds first to the demand. " Deep 
calleth unto deep." Li October, 1765, delegates, 
regularly or irregularly chosen, from nine Colonies, 
are in consultation in 'New York; and from South 
Carolina comes the watchword of assured success: 
" There ought to be no Kew England man, no New 
Yorker, known on the Continent; but all of us 
Americans." 

Meantime, the people are everywhere inflamed and 



JULY 4, 1876. 63 

maddened by the attempt to enforce the Stamp Act. 
Everywhere that attempt is resisted. Everywhere it 
is resolved that it shall never be executed. It is at 
length repealed, and a momentary lull succeeds. 
But the repeal is accompanied by more declaratory 
resolutions of the power of Parliament to tax the 
Colonies "in all cases whatsoever;" and then fol- 
lows that train of abuses and usurpations which 
JeiFerson's immortal paper charges upon the King, 
and which the King himself unquestionably ordered. 
"It was to no purpose," said Lord North, in 1774, 
" making objections, for the King would have it so." 
" The King," said he, " meant fo try the question with 
America." And it is well added, by the narrator of 
the anecdote, " Boston seems to have been the place 
fixed upon to try the question," 

Yes, at Boston, the bolts of Royal indignation are 
to be aimed and winged. She has been foremost in 
destroying the Stamps, in defying the Soldiers, in 
drowning the Tea. Letters, too, have reached the 
government, like those which Rehum the Chnncellor 
and Shimshai the Scribe wrote to King Artaxerxes 
about Jerusalem, calling this " a rebellious city, and 
hurtful unto Kings and Provinces, and that they have 
moved sedition within the same of old time, and would 
not pay toll, tribute, and custom ; " and warning His 
Majesty that, unless it was subdued and crushed, 
" he would have no portion on this side the River." 



64* ORATION. 

In vain did our eloquent young Quincy pour forth his 
burning words of remonstrance. The Port of Boston 
is closed, and her people are to be starved into com- 
pliance. Well did Boston say of herself, in Town 
Meeting, that " She had been stationed by Providence 
in the front rank of the conflict." Grandly has our 
eloquent historian, Bancroft, said of her, in a sen- 
tence which sums up the whole matter " like the last 
embattling of a Poman legion " : — " The King set 
himself and his Ministry and his Parliament and all 
Great Britain to subdue to his will one stubborn 
little town on the sterile coast of the Massachusetts 
Bay. The odds against it were fearful; but it 
showed a life inextinguishable, and had been chosen 
to guard over the liberties of mankind! " 

Generously and nobly did the other Colonies come 
to our aid, and the cause of Boston was everywhere 
acknowledged to be " the cause of all." But we may 
not forget how peculiarly it was " the cause of Bos- 
ton," and that here, on our own Massachusetts soil, 
the practical question of Independence was first tried 
and virtually settled. The brave Colonel Pickering 
at Salem Bridge, the heroic minute men at Lexington 
and Concord Bridge, the gallant Colonel Prescott at 
Bunker Hill, did their part in hastening that settle- 
ment and bringing it to a crisis; and when the Con- 
tinental Army was at length brought to our rescue, 
and the glorious Washington, after holding the 



JULY 4, 1876. 65 

British forces at bay for nine months, had fairly 
driven them from the town, — though more than 
three months were still to intervene before the Dec- 
laration was to be made, — it could truly and justly 
be said that it was only "the declaration of a fact 
which already exists." 

Indeed, Massachusetts had practically administered 
" a government independent of the King " from the 
19th of July, 1775; while on the very first day of 
May, 1776, her General Court had passed a solemn 
Act, to erase forthwith the name of the King, and the 
year of his reign, from all civil commissions, writs, 
and precepts; and to substitute therefor "the Year 
of the Christian Era, and the name; of the Govern- 
ment and the people of the Massachusetts Bay in 
iNTew England." Other Colonies may have empow- 
ered or instructed their delegates in Congress, earlier 
than this Colony, to act on the subject. But this 
was action itself, — positive, decisive, conclusive 
action. The Declaration was made in Philadelphia; 
but the Independence which was declared can date 
back nowhere, for its first existence as a fact, earlier 
than to Massachusetts. Upon her the lot fell " to try 
the question ; " and, with the aid of Washington and 
the Continental Army, it was tried, and tried trium- 
phantly, upon her soil. Certainly, if Faneuil Hall 
was the Cradle of Liberty, our Old State House was 
the Cradle of Independence, and our Old South the 



66 ORATION. 

Nursery of Liberty and Independence botli; and if 
these sacred edifices, all or any of them, are indeed 
destined to disappear, let us see to it that some cor- 
ner of their sites, at least, be consecrated to monu- 
ments which shall tell their story, in legible lettering, 
to our children and our children's children for ever! 

Thanks be to God, that, in His good providence, 
the trial of this great question fell primarily upon a 
Colony and a j^eople peculiarly fitted to meet it; — 
whose whole condition and training had prepared 
them for it, and whose whole history had pointed 
to it. 

"Why, quaint old John Evelyn, in his delicious 
Diary, tells us, under date of May, 1671, that the 
great anxiety of the Council for Plantations, of which 
he had just been made a member, was " to know the 
condition of 'New England," which appeared " to be 
very independent as to their regard to Old England 
or His Majesty," £^nd " almost upon the very brink of 
renouncing any dependence on the Crown! " 

" I have always laughed," said John Adams, in a 
letter to Benjamin Rush, in 1807, " at the affectation 
of representing American Independence as a novel 
idea, as a modern discovery, as a late invention. The 
idea of it as a possible thing, as a probable event, as 
a necessary and unavoidable measure, in case Great 
Britain should assume an unconstitutional authority 
over us, has been familiar to Americans from the first 



JULY 4, 1876. 67 

settlement of the country, and was as well under- 
stood by Governor Wintlirop, in 1G75, as by Governor 
Samuel Adams, when he told you that Independence 
had been the first wisli of his heart for seven years." 
" The princi^Dles and feelings which produced the 
Revolution," said he again, in his second letter to 
Tudor, in 1818, " ought to be traced back for two 
hundred years, and sought in the history of the coun- 
try from the first plantations in America." * The first 
emigrants, he maintains, were the true authors of our 
Independence, and the men of the Revolutionary 
period, himself among them, were only " the awaken- 
ers and revivers of the original fundamental principle 
of Colonization." 

And the accomplished historian of Kew England, 
Dr. Palfrey, follows up the idea, and says more pre- 
cisely: "He who well weighs the facts which have 
been presented in connection with the principal 
emigration to Massachusetts, and .other related facts 
which will ofier themselves to notice as we proceed, 
may find himself conducted to the conclusion that 
when Winthrop and his associates (in 1629) pre- 
pared to convey across the water a Charter from the 
King, which, they hoped, would in their beginnings 
afford them some protection both from himself and, 
through him, from the Powers of Continental 
Europe, they had conceived a project no less im- 
portant than that of laying on this side of the 



68 ORATION. 

Atlantic the foundations of a Nation of Puritan 
Englishmen, — foundations to be built upon as future 
circumstances should decide or allow." 

Indeed, that transfer of their Charter and of their 
^' whole government " to 'New England, on their own 
responsibility, was an act closely approaching to a 
Declaration of Independence, and clearly foreshad- 
owing it. And when, only a few years afterwards, 
we jQnd the magistrates and deputies resisting a 
demand for the surrender of the Charter, studiously 
and systematically " avoiding and protracting " all 
questions on the subject, and "hastening their for- 
tifications " meantime ; and when we hear even the 
ministers of the Colony openly declaring that, " if a 
General Governor were sent over here, we ought not 
to accept him, but to defend our lawful possessions, 
if we were able," — we recognize a spirit and a 
purpose which cannot be mistaken. That spirit and 
that purpose were manifested and illustrated in a 
manner even more marked and unequivocal, — as 
the late venerable Josiah Quincy reminded the 
people of Boston, just half a century ago to-day, — 
when under the lead of one who had come over in 
the ship with the Charter, and had lived to be the 
!N"estor of New England, — Simon Bradstreet, — "a 
glorious Revolution was effected here in Massachu- 
setts thirty days before it was known that King Wil- 
liam had just effected a similar glorious Kevolution 



JULY 4, 1876. 69 

on the other side of the Atlantic." ^ew England, 
it seems, with characteristic and commendable de- 
spatch, had fairly got rid of Sir Edmund Andros, a 
month before she knew that Old England had got 
rid of his Master ! 

But I do not forget that we must look further 
back than even the earliest settlement of the Amer- 
ican Colonies for the primal Fiat of Independence. 
I do not forget that when Edmund Burke, in 1775, 
in alluding to the possibility of an American repre- 
sentation in Parliament, exclaimed so emphatically 
and eloquently, " Opposuit IS^atura — I cannot re- 
move the eternal barriers of the creation," he had 
really exhausted the whole argument. 'No effective 
representation was possible. If it had been possible, 
England herself would have been aghast at it. The 
very idea of James Otis and Patrick Henry and the 
Adamses arguing the great questions of human 
rights and popular liberty on the floor of the House 
of Commons, and in the hearing of the common 
people of Great Britain, would have thrown the 
King and Lord North into convulsions of terror, and 
we should soon have heard them crying out, " These 
men that have turned the world upside down are 
come hither also." One of their own Board of 
Trade (Soame Jenyns) well said, with as much truth 
as humor or sarcasm, " I have lately seen so many 
specimens of the great powers of speech of which 



70 ORATION. 

these American gentlemen are possessed, that I 
should be afraid the sudden importation of so much 
eloquence at once would endanger the safety of 
England. It will be much cheaper for us to pay 
their Army than their Orators." But no eifective 
representation was possible ; and without it Taxation 
was Tyranny, in spite of the great Dictionary dog- 
matist and his insolent pamphlet. 

Why, even in these days of Ocean Steamers, 
reducing the passage across the Atlantic from forty 
or fifty or sixty days to ten, representation in "West- 
minster Hall is not proposed for the colonies which 
England still holds on our continent; and it would 
be little better than a farce, if it were proposed and 
attempted. The Dominion of Canada, as we all 
know, remains as she is, seeking neither indepen- 
dence nor annexation, only because her people prefer 
to be, and are proud of being, a part of the British 
empire ; and because that empire has abandoned all 
military occupation or forcible restraint upon them, 
and has adopted a system involving no collision or 
contention. Canada is now doubly a monument of 
the greatness and wisdom of the immortal Chatham. 
His military policy conquered it for England ; and 
his civil policy, " ruling from his urn," and supple- 
mented by that of his great son, holds it for England 
at this day ; permitting it substantially to rule itself, 
through the agency of a Parliament of its own, with 



JULY 4, 1876. 71 

at this moment, as it happens, an able, intelligent, 
and accomplished Governor-General, whose name 
and blood were not without close affinities to those 
of that marvellous statesman and orator while he 
lived. 

It did not require the warning of our example to 
bring about such results. It is written in the eternal 
constitution of things that no large colonies, edu- 
cated to a sense of their rights and capable of 
defending them, — no English or Anglo-Saxon colo- 
nies, certainly, — can be governed by a Power three 
thousand miles across an ocean, unless they are gov- 
erned to their own satisfaction, and held as colonies 
with their own consent and free will. An Imperial 
military sway may be as elastic and far-reaching as 
the magnetic wires, — it matters not whether three 
thousand or fifteen thousand miles, — over an unciv- 
ilized region or an unenlightened race. But who is 
wild enough to conceive, as Burke said a hundred 
years ago, " that the natives of Hindostan and those 
of Virginia could be ordered in the same manner; or 
that the Cutchery Court and the grand jury at 
Salem could be regulated on a similar plan"? "I 
am convinced," said Fox, in 1791, in the fresh light 
of the experience America had afforded him, " that 
the only method of retaining distant Colonies with 
advantage is to enable them to govern themselves." 

Yes, from the hour when Columbus and his com- 



72 ORATION. 

peers discovered our continent, its ultimate political 
destiny was fixed. At the very gateway of the 
Pantheon of American Liberty and American Inde- 
pendence might well be seen a triple monument, like 
that to the old inventors of printing at Frankfort, 
including Columbus and Americus Yespucius and 
Cabot. They were the pioneers in the march to 
Independence. They were the precursors in the 
only progress of freedom which was to have no 
backward steps. Liberty had struggled long and 
bravely in other ages and in other lands. It had 
made glorious manifestations of its power and 
promise in Athens and in Rome; in the mediaeval 
republics of Italy; on the plains of Germany; along 
the dykes of Holland; among the icy fastnesses of 
Switzerland; and, more securely and hopefully still, 
in the sea-girt isle of Old England. But it was the 
glory of those heroic old navigators to reveal a 
standing-place for it at last, where its lever could 
find a secure fulcrum, and rest safely until it had 
moved the world! The fulness of tmie had now 
come. Under an impulse of religious conviction, 
the poor, persecuted Pilgrims launched out upon the 
stormy deep in a single, leaking, almost foundering 
bark; and in the very cabin of the "May-flower" the 
first written compact of self-government in the his- 
tory of mankind is prepared and signed. Ten years 
afterwards the Massachusetts Company come over 



JULY i, 1876. 73 

with their Charter, and administer it on the avowed 
principle that the whole government, civil and 
rehgious, is transferred. All the rest which is to 
follow until the 4th of July, 1776, is only matter of 
time and opportunity. Certainly, my friends, as we 
look back to-day through the long vista of the past, 
we perceive that it was no mere Declaration of men, 
which primarily brought about the Independence we 
celebrate. We cannot but reverently recognize the 
hand of that Almighty Maker of the World, who 
" founded it upon the seas and established it upon 
the floods." We cannot but feel the full force and 
felicity of those opening words, in which the Decla- 
ration speaks of our assuming among the powers of 
the earth, " that separate and equal station to which 
the laws of JS^ature and of Nature's God entitle 



I spoke, Mr. Mayor, at the outset of this Oration, 
of "A Century of Self-Government Completed." 
And so, in some sort, it is. The Declaration at 
Philadelphia was, in itself, both an assertion and an 
act of self-government; and it had been preceded, or 
was immediately followed, by provisions for local 
self-government in all the separate Colonies ; — 
Massachusetts, ^ew Hampshire, and South Carolina, 
conditionally, at least, having led the way. But we 
may not forget that six or seven years of hard figlit- 

10 



74 ORATION^. 

ing are still to intervene before our Independence is 
to be acknowledged by Great Britain; and six or 
seven years more before the full consummation will 
have been reached by the adoption of the Federal 
Constitution, and the organization of our ^National 
System under the august and transcendent Presi- 
dency of Washington. 

"With that august and transcendent Presidency, 
dating, — as it is pleasant to remember, — precisely a 
hundred years from the analogous accession of Wil- 
liam of Orange to the throne of England, our history 
as an organized ]N"ation fairly begins. When that 
Centennial Anniversary shall arrive, thirteen years 
hence, the time may have come for a full review of 
our National career and character, and for a complete 
computation or a just estimate of what a Century of 
Self-Government has accomplished for ourselves and 
for mankind. 

I dared not attempt such a review to-day. This 
Anniversary has seemed to me to belong peculiarly, 
— I had almost said, sacredly, — to the men and the 
events which rendered the Fourth of July so mem- 
orable for ever; and I have wilHngly left myself little 
time for any thing else. God grant, that, when the 
30th of April, 1889, shall dawn upon those of us who 
may live to see it, the thick clouds which now darken 
our political sky may have passed away; that whole- 
some and healing counsels may have prevailed 



JULY 4, 1876. 75 

throughout our land; that integrity and purity may 
be once more conspicuous in our high places; that 
an honest currency may have been re-established, and 
prosperity restored to all branches of our domestic 
industry and our foreign commerce; and that some 
of those social problems which are perplexing and 
tormenting so many of our Southern States may have 
been safely and satisfactorily solved! 

For, indeed. Fellow Citizens, we cannot shut our 
eyes to the fact, that this great year of our Lord and 
of American Liberty has been ushered in by not a few 
discouraging and depressing circumstances. Appall- 
ing catastrophes, appalling crimes, have marked its 
course. Financial, political, moral, delinquencies and 
wrongs have swept over our land like an Arctic or 
an Antarctic wave, or both conjoined; until we have 
been almost ready to cry out in anguish to Heaven, 
" Thou hast multiplied the nation, but not increased 
the joy! " It will be an added stigma, in all time to 
come, on the corruption of the hour, and on all con- 
cerned in it, that it has cast so deep a shade over our 
Centennial Festival. 

All this, however, we are persuaded, is temporary 
and exceptional, — the result, not of om* institutions, 
but of disturbing causes ; and as distinctly traceable 
to those causes as the scoriae of a volcano, or the 
debris of a deluge. Had there been no long and 
demoralizing Civil War to account for such develop- 



4 

76 OKATION^. 

ments, we might indeed be alarmed for our future. 
As it is, our confidence in the Kepublic is unshaken. 
We are ready even to accept all that has occurred to 
overshadow our jubilee, as a seasonable warning 
against vain-glorious boastings; as a timely admoni- 
tion that our institutions are not proof against hcen- 
tiousness and profligacy, but that " eternal vigilance 
is still the price of liberty." 

Already the reaction has commenced. Already 
the people are everywhere roused to the miportance 
of something higher than mere partisan activity and 
zeal, and to a sense that something besides "big 
wars" may be required to "make ambition virtue." 
Everywhere the idea is scouted that there are any 
immunities or impunities for bribery and corruption ; 
and the scorn of the whole people is deservedly cast 
on any one detected in plucking our Eagle's wings 
to feather his own nest. Everywhere there is a de- 
mand for integrity, for principle, for character, as the 
only safe qualifications for public employments, as 
well as for private trusts. Oh, let that demand be 
enforced and insisted on, — as I hope and believe it 
will be, — and we shall have nothing to fear for our 
freedom, and but little to regret in the temporary 
depression and mortification which have recalled us 
to a deeper sense of our dangers and our duties. 

Meantime, we may be more than content that no 
short-comings or failures of our own day can diminish 



JULY 4, 1876. 77 

the glories of the past, or dun the brilhancy of suc- 
cesses achieved by our Fathers. We can look back 
upon our history so far, and find in it enough to make 
us grateful; enough to make us hopeful; enough to 
make us proud of our institutions and of our country ; 
enough to make us resolve never to despair of the 
Kepublic; enough to assure us that, could our 
Fathers look down on all which has been accom- 
plished, they would feel that their toils and sacrifices 
had not been in vain; enough to convuice other 
nations, and the world at large, that, in uniting so 
generously with us to decorate our grand Exposition, 
and celebrate our Centennial Birthday, they are 
swelling the triumphs of a People and a Power which 
have left no doubtful impress upon the hundred years 
of their Independent ]N^ational existence. 

Those hundred years have been crowded, as we all 
know, with wonderfnl changes in all quarters of the 
globe. I would not disparage or dejDreciate the 
interest and importance of the great events and great 
reforms which have been witnessed during their 
progress, and especially near their end, in almost 
every country of the Old "World. ]^or would I pre- 
sume to claim too confidently for the closing Cen- 
tury, that when the records of mankind are made up, 
in some far-distant future, it will be remembered 
and designated, peculiarly and pre-eminently, as The 
American Age. Yet it may well be doubted. 



78 ORATION-. 

whether the dispassionate historian of after years 
will find that the influences of any other nation have 
been of farther reach and wider range, or of more 
efficiency for the welfare of the world, than those of 
our Great Republic, since it had a name and a place 
on the earth. 

Other ages have had their designations, local or 
personal or mythical, — historic or pre-historic ; — 
Ages of stone or iron, of silver or gold; Ages of 
Kings or Queens, of Reformers or of Conquerors. 
That marvellous compound of almost every thing 
wise or foolish, noble or base, witty or ridiculous, 
sublime or profane, — Yoltaire, — maintained that, in 
his day, no man of reflection or of taste could count 
more than four authentic Ages in the history of the 
world: 1. That of Philip and Alexander, with Peri- 
cles and Demosthenes, Aristotle and Plato, Apelles, 
Phidias and Praxiteles: 2. That of Csesar and 
Augustus, with Lucretius and Cicero and Livy, 
Yirgil and Horace, Yarro and Yitruvius: 3. That 
of the Medici, with Michel Angelo and Raphael, 
Galileo and Dante: 4. That which he was at the 
moment engaged in depicting, — the Age of Louis 
XIY., which, in his judgment, surpassed all the 
others ! 

Our American Age could bear no com]3arison with 
Ages like these, — measured only by the brilliancy 
of historians and philosophers, of poets or painters. 



JULY 4, 1876. 79 

We need not, indeed, be ashamed of what has been 
done for Literature and Science and Art, during 
these hundred years, nor hesitate to point with pride 
to our own authors and artists, living and dead. 
But the day has gone by when Literature and the 
Fine Arts, or even Science and the Useful Arts, can 
characterize an Age. There are other and higher 
measures of comparison. And the very nation 
which counts Voltaire among its greatest celebrities, 
— the nation which aided us so generously in our 
Revolutionary struggle, and which is now rejoicing 
in its ow^i successful establishment of republican 
institutions, — the land of the great and good La- 
fayette, — has taken the lead in pointing out the true 
grounds on which our American Age may challenge 
and claim a special recognition. An association of 
Frenchmen, — under the lead of some of their most 
distinguished statesmen and scholars, — has proposed 
to erect, and is engaged in erecting, as their contri- 
bution to our Centennial, a gigantic statue at the 
very throat of the harbor of our supreme commer- 
cial emporium, w^hich shall symbolize the legend 
inscribed on its pedestal, — "Liberty enlightening 
the World!" 

That glorious legend presents the standard by 
which our Age is to be judged ; and by which we 
may well be willing and proud to have it judged. 
All else in our own career, certainly, is secondary. 



80 ORATIOIS^. 

The growth and grandeur of our territorial dimen- 
sions; the multiphcation of our States; the number 
and size and wealth of our cities; the marvellous 
increase of our population; the measureless extent 
of our railways and internal navigation; our over- 
flowing granaries; our inexhaustible mines; our 
coimtless inventions and multitudinous industries, — 
all these may be remitted to the Census, and left for 
the students of statistics. The claim which our 
country presents, for giving no second or subordi- 
nate character to the Age which has just closed, rests 
only on what has been accomplished, at home and 
abroad, for elevating the condition of manldnd; for 
advancing political and human freedom ; for promot- 
ing the greatest good of the greatest number; for 
proving the capacity of man for self-government; and 
for "enlightening the world" by the example of a 
rational, regulated, enduring. Constitutional Liberty. 
And who will dispute or question that claim? In 
what region of the earth ever so remote from us, in 
what corner of creation ever so far out of the range 
of our communication, does not some burden light- 
ened, some bond loosened, some yoke lifted, some 
labor better remunerated, some new hope for despair- 
ing hearts, some new light or new liberty for the 
benighted or the oppressed, bear witness this day, 
and trace itself directly or indirectly back, to the 
impulse given to the world by the successful estab- 



JULY 4, 1876. 81 

lisliment and operation of Free Institutions on this 
American Continent! 

How many Colonies have been more wisely and 
humanely and liberally administered, under the warn- 
ing of our Revolution! How many Churches have 
abated something of their old intolerance and big- 
otry, under the encouragement of our religious free- 
dom! Who believes or imagines that Free Schools, 
a Free Press, the Elective Franchise, the Rights of 
Representation, the principles of Constitutional Gov- 
ernment, would have made the notable progress they 
have made, had our example been wanting ! Who 
believes or imagines that even the Rotten Boroughs 
of Old England would have disappeared so rapidly, 
had there been no American Representative Re- 
public! And has there been a more effective influ- 
ence on human welfare and human freedom, since 
the world began, than that which has resulted from 
the existence of a great land of Liberty in this 
Western Hemisphere, of unbounded resources, with 
acres enough for a myriad of homes, and with a wel- 
come for all who may fly to it from oppression, from 
every region beneath the sun ? 

Let not our example be perverted or dishonored, 
by others or by ourselves. It was no mid breaking 
away from all authority, which we celebrate to-day. 
It was no mad revolt against every thing like govern- 
ment. ]N'o incendiary torch can be rightfully kindled 
11 



82 . OKATION. 

at our flame. Doubtless, there had been excesses 
and violences in many quarters of our land, — irre- 
pressible outbreaks under unbearable provocations, 
— " irregular things, done in the confusion of mighty 
troubles." Doubtless, our Boston mobs did not 
always move " to the Dorian mood of flutes and soft 
recorders." But in all our deliberative assemblies, in 
all our Town Meetings, in all our Provincial and 
Continental Congresses, there was a respect for 
the great principles of Law and Order ; and the 
definition of true civil liberty, which had been so 
remarkably laid down by one of the founders of our 
Commonwealth, more than a century before, was, 
consciously or unconsciously, recognized, — "a Lib- 
erty for that only which is good, just, and honest." 
The Declaration we commemorate expressly ad- 
mitted and asserted that " governments long estab- 
lished should not be changed for light and transient 
causes." It dictated no special forms of government 
for other people, and hardly for ourselves. It had 
no denunciations, or even disparagements, for mon- 
archies or for empires, but eagerly contemplated, as 
we do at this hour, alliances and friendly relations 
with both. We have welcomed to our Jubilee, with 
peculiar interest and gratification, the representatives 
of the nations of Europe, — all then monarchical, — 
to whom we were so deeply indebted for sympathy 
and for assistance in our struggle for Independence. 



JULY 4, 187G. 83 

We have welcomed, too, the personal presence of an 
Emperor, from another quarter of our own hem- 
isphere, of whose eager and enlightened interest in 
Education and Literature and Science we had 
learned so much from our lamented Agassiz, and 
have now witnessed so much for ourselves. 

Our Fathers were no propagandists of republican 
institutions in the abstract. Then- own adoption of 
a republican form was, at the moment, almost as 
much a matter of chance as of choice, of necessity 
as of preference. The Thirteen Colonies had, hap- 
pily, been too long accustomed to manage their own 
affairs, and were too wisely jealous of each other, 
also, to admit for an instant any idea of centraliza- 
tion ; and without centralization a monarchy, or any 
other form of arbitrary government, was out of the 
question. Union was then, as it is now, the only 
safety for liberty; but it could only be a constitutional 
Union, a Imiited and restricted Union, founded on 
compromises and mutual concessions ; a Union recog- 
nizing a large measure of State rights, — resting 
not only on the division of powers among legislative 
and executive departments, but resting also on the 
distribution of powers between the States and the 
Nation, both deriving their original authority from 
the people, and exercising that authority for the 
people. This was the system contemplated by 
the Declaration of 1776. This was the system ap- 



84 OKATION, 

proximated to by the Confederation of 1778-81. 
This was the system finally consummated by the 
Constitution of 1789. And under this system our 
great example of self-government has been held up 
before the nations, fulfilling, so far as it has ful- 
filled it, that lofty mission which is recognized 
today, as "Liberty enlightening the World! " 

Let me not speak of that example in any vain- 
glorious spirit. Let me not seem to arrogate for my 
country any thing of superior wisdom or virtue. 
Who will pretend that we have always made the 
most of our independence, or the best of our liberty? 
Who will maintain that we have always exhibited the 
brightest side of our institutions, or always entrusted 
their administration to the wisest or worthiest men? 
Who will deny that we have sometimes taught the 
world what to avoid, as well as what to imitate; and 
that the cause of freedom and reform has sometimes 
been discouraged and put back by our short-com- 
ings, or by our excesses? Our Light has been, at 
best, but a Revolving Light; warning by its darker 
intervals or its sombre shades, as well as cheering by 
its flashes of brilliancy, or by the clear lustre of its 
steadier shining. Yet, in spite of all its imperfec- 
tions and irregularities, to no other earthly light 
have so many eyes been turned; from no other 
earthly illumination have so many hearts drawn hope 
and courage. It has breasted the tides of sectional 



JULY 4, 1876. 85 

and of party strife. It has stood the shock of for- 
eign and of civil war. It will still hold on, erect 
and unextinguished, defying " the returning wave " of 
demoralization and corruption. Millions of young 
hearts, in all quarters of our land, are awaking at 
this moment to the responsibility which rests pecu- 
liarly upon them, for rendering its radiance purer 
and brighter and more constant. Millions of young 
hearts are resolving, at this hour, that it shall not be 
their fault if it do not stand for a century to come, as 
it has stood for a century past, a Beacon of Liberty 
to mankind! Their little flags of hope and promise 
are floating to-day from every cottage window along 
the roadside. With those young hearts it is safe. 

Meantime, we may all rejoice and take courage, as 
we remember of how great a drawback and obstruc- 
tion our example has been disembarrassed and re- 
lieved within a few years past. Certainly, we 
cannot forget this day, in looking back over the 
century which is gone, how long that example was 
overshadowed, in the eyes of all men, by the exist- 
ence of African Slavery in so considerable a portion 
of our country. ^KTever, never, however, — it may 
be safely said, — was there a more tremendous, a 
more dreadful, problem submitted to a nation for 
solution, than that which this institution involved for 
the United States of America. lS[or were we alone 
responsible for its existence. I do not speak of it in 



86 OKATION. 

the way of apology for ourselves. Still less would I 
refer to it in the way of crimination or reproach 
towards others, abroad or at home. But the well- 
known paragraph on this subject, in the original 
draught of the Declaration, is quite too notable a 
reminiscence of the little desk before me, to be for- 
gotten on such an occasion as this. That omitted 
clause, — which, as Mr. JejEFerson tells us, " was 
struck out in complaisance to South Carolina and 
Georgia," not without " tenderness," too, as he adds, 
to some " Northern brethren, who, though they had 
very few slaves themselves, had been pretty consid- 
erable carriers of them to others," — contained the 
direct allegation that the King had " prostituted his 
negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to 
prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce." That 
memorable clause, omitted for prudential reasons 
only, has passed into history, and its truth can never 
be disputed. It recalls to us, and recalls to the 
world, the historical fact, — which we certainly have 
a special right to remember this day, — that not only 
had African Slavery found its portentous and per- 
nicious way into our Colonies in their very earliest 
settlement, but that it had been fixed and fastened 
upon some of them by Royal vetoes, prohibiting the 
passage of laws to restrain its further introduction. 
It had thus not only entwined and entangled itself 
about the very roots of our choicest harvests, — 



JULY 4, 1876. 87 

until Slavery and Cotton at last seemed as insepa- 
rable as the tares and wheat of the sacred par- 
able, — but it had engrafted itself upon the very 
fabric of our government. We all know, the world 
knows, that our Independence could not have been 
achieved, our Union could not have been maintained, 
our Constitution could not have been established, 
without the adoption of those compromises which 
recognized its continued existence, and left it to the 
responsibility of the States of which it was the 
grievous inheritance. And from that day forward, 
the method of dealing with it, of disposing of it, and 
of extinguishing it, became more and more a prob- 
lem full of terrible perplexity, and seemingly inca- 
pable of human solution. 

Oh, that it could have been solved at last by some 
process less deplorable and dreadful than Civil War ! 
How unspeakably glorious it would have been for us 
this day, could the Great Emancipation have been 
concerted, arranged, and ultimately effected, without 
violence or bloodshed, as a simple and sublune act of 
philanthropy and justice ! 

But it was not in the Divine economy that so 
huge an original wrong should be righted by any 
easy process. The decree seemed to have gone forth 
from. the very registries of Heaven: 

" Cnncta prius tentanda, sed immedicabile vulnus 
Ense recidendum est." 



88 ORATION. 

The immedicable wound must be cut away by the 
sword ! Again and again as that terrible war went 
on, we might almost hear voices crying out, in the 
words of the old prophet : " O thou sword of the 
Lord, how long will it be ere thou be quiet? Put 
up thyself into thy scabbard ; rest, and be still ! " 
But the answering voice seemed not less audible: 
" How can it be quiet, seeing the Lord hath given it 
a charge?" 

And the war went on, — bravely fought on both 
sides, as we all know, — until, as one of its necessi- 
ties. Slavery was abolished. It fell at last under that 
right of war to abolish it, which the late John Quincy 
Adams had been the first to announce in the way of 
warning, more than twenty years before, in my own 
hearing, on the floor of Congress, while I was your 
Representative. I remember well the burst of indig- 
nation and derision with which that warning was 
received. 'No prediction of Cassandra was ever 
more scorned than his, and he did not live 
to witness its verification. But whoever else may 
have been more immediately and personally instru- 
mental in the final result, — the brave soldiers who 
fought the battles, or the gallant generals who led 
them, — the devoted philanthropists, or the ardent 
statesmen, who, in season and out of season, labored 
for it, — the Martyr-President who proclaimed it, — 
the true story of Emancipation can never be fairly 



JULY 4. 1S7«>. 8l> 

and fiillT told without the " old man eloquent," ^vl\o 
died beneath the roof of the Capitol nearlv thirty 
years ago, being recognized as one of the hauling 
figures of the narrative. 

But, thanks be to God, who overrules every thing 
for good, that great event, the greatest of our Amer- 
ican Age, — great enough, alone and by itself to give 
a name and a character to any Age, — has been 
accomphshed; and, by His blessing, we present our 
coimtry to the world this day without a slave, white 
or black, upon its soil! Thanks be to God, not only 
that our beloved Union has been saved, but that it 
has been made both easier to save, and better worth 
saving, hereafter, by the final solution of a problem, 
before which all human wisdom had stood 'aghast 
and confounded for so many generations! Thanks 
be to God, and to Him be all the praise and the glory, 
we can read the great words of the Declaration, on 
this Centennial Anniversary, without reservation or 
evasion: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, 
that all men are created equal, and that they are 
endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable 
rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the 
pursuit of happiness." The legend on that new 
colossal Pharos, at Long Island, may now indeed be, 
" Liberty enlightening the World ! " 

We come then, to-day. Fellow Citizens, with hearts 

12 



90 ORATION. 

full of gratitude to God and man, to pass down our 
country, and its institutions, — not wholly Avithout 
scars and blemishes upon their front, — not without 
shadows on the past or clouds on the future, — but 
freed for ever from at least one great stain, and 
firmly rooted in the love and loyalty of a United 
People, — to the generations which are to succeed 
us. 

And what shall we say to those succeeding gener- 
ations, as we commit the sacred trust to their keeping 
and guardianship? 

If I could hope, without presumption, that any 
humble counsels of mine, on this hallowed Anniver- 
sary, could be remembered beyond the hour of their 
utterance, and reach the ears of my countrymen in 
future days ; if I could borrow " the masterly pen " 
of Jefferson, and produce words which should par- 
take of the immortality of those which he wrote on 
this little desk; if I could command the matchless 
tongue of John Adams, when he poured out appeals 
and arguments which moved men from their seats, 
and settled the destinies of a N^ation ; if I could catch 
but a single spark of those electric fires which Frank- 
lin wrested from the skies, and flash down a phrase, 
a word, a thought, along the magic chords which 
stretch across the ocean of the future, — what could 
I, what would I, say? 

I could not omit, certainly, to reiterate the solemn 



JULY 4, 1876. 91 

obligations which rest on every citizen of this 
RepubHc to cherish and enforce the great principles 
of our Colonial and Revolutionary Fathers, — the 
principles of Liberty and Law, one and inseparable, 
— the principles of the Constitution and the Union. 

I could not omit to urge on every man to re- 
member that self-government politically can only be 
successful, if it be accompanied by self-government 
personally; that there must be government some- 
where; and that, if the people are mdeed to be sov- 
ereigns, they must exercise their sovereignty over 
themselves individually, as well as over themselves 
in the aggregate, — regulating their own lives, resist- 
ing then- own temptations, subduing their own 
passions, and voluntarily imposing upon themselves 
some measure of that restraint and discipline, which, 
under other systems, is supplied from the armories of 
arbitrary power, — the discipline of virtue, in the 
place of the discipline of slavery. 

I could not omit to caution them against the cor- 
rupting influences of intemperance, extravagance, 
and luxm-y. I could not omit to warn them against 
political intrigue, as well as against personal licen- 
tiousness; and to implore them to regard principle 
and character, rather than mere party allegiance, in 
the choice of men to rule over them. 

I could not omit to call upon them to foster and 
further the cause of universal Education; to give a 



92 ORATION. 

liberal support to our Schools and Colleges ; to pro- 
mote the advancement of Science and of Art, in all 
their multiplied divisions and relations; and to 
encourage and sustain all those noble institutions of 
Charity, which, in our own land above all others, 
have given the crowning grace and glory to modern 
civilization. 

I could not refrain from pressing upon them a just 
and generous consideration for the interests and the 
rights of their fellow-men everywhere, and an 
earnest effort to promote Peace and Good "Will 
among the Nations of the earth. 

I could not refrain from reminding them of the 
shame, the unspeakable shame and ignominy, which 
would attach to those who should show themselves 
unable to uphold the glorious Fabric of Self-Govern- 
ment which had been founded for them at such a cost 
by their Fathers ; — " Videte, videte, ne, ut ilUs 'pidchev- 
rimum fuit tantam vobis imperii gloriam relinquere, 
sic vobis hirpissimum sit, illud quod accejnslis, tueri 
et conservdre non posse ! " 

And surely, most surely, I could not fail to invoke 
them to unitate and emulate the examples of virtue 
and purity and patriotism, which the gi*eat founders 
of our Colonies and of our Nation had so abun- 
dantly left them. 

But could I stop there? Could I hold out to them, 
as the results of a long life of observation and expe- 



JULY 4, 1876. 93 

rience, nothing but the principles and examples of 
great men? 

Who and what are great men? "Woe to the 
country," said Metternich to our own Ticknor, forty 
years ago, "whose condition and institutions no 
longer produce great men to manage its affairs." 
The wily Austrian applied his remark to England at 
that day ; but his woe — if it be a woe — would have 
a wider range in our time, and leave hardly any land 
unreached. Certainly we hear it now-a-days, at 
every turn, that never before has there been so 
striking a disproportion between supply and de- 
mand, as at this moment, the world over, in the 
commodity of great men. 

But who, and what, are great men? "And now 
stand forth," says an eminent Swiss historian, who 
had completed a survey of the whole history of 
mankind, at the very moment when, as he says, " a 
blaze of freedom is just biu'sting forth beyond the 
ocean," — " And now stand forth, ye gigantic forms, 
shades of the first Chieftains, and sons of Gods, who 
glimmer among the rocky halls and mountain 
fortresses of the ancient world; and you Conquerors 
of the world from Babylon and from Macedonia; ye 
Dynasties of Caesars, of Huns, Arabs, Moguls and 
Tartars; ye Commanders of the Faithful on the 
Tigris, and Connnanders of the Faithful on the 
Tiber; you hoary Counsellors of Kings, and Peers 



94 ORATION. 

of Sovereigns; Warriors on the car of triumph, cov- 
ered with scars, and crowned with laurels; ye long 
rows of Consuls and Dictators, famed for your lofty 
minds, your unshaken constancy, your ungovernable 
spirit; — stand forth, and let us survey for a while 
your assembly, like a Council of the Gods! What 
were ye? The first among mortals? Seldom can 
you claim that title! The best of men? Still fewer 
of you have deserved such praise! Were ye the 
compellers, the instigators of the human race, the 
prime movers of all their works? Rather let us say 
that you were the instruments, that you were the 
wheels, by whose means • the Invisible Being has 
conducted the incomprehensible fabric of universal 
government across the ocean of time ! " 

Instruments and wheels of the Invisible Governor 
of the Universe! This is indeed all which the 
greatest of men ever have been, or ever can be. ]S^o 
flatteries of courtiers; no adulations of the multi- 
tude; no audacity of self-reliance; no intoxications 
of success; no evolutions or developments of sci- 
ence, — can make more or other of them. This is 
" the sea-mark of their utmost sail," — the goal of 
their farthest run, — the very round and top of their 
highest soaring. 

Oh, if there could be, to-day, a deeper and more 
pervading impression of this great truth through- 
out our land, and a more prevailing conformity 



JULY 4, 1876. 95 

of our thoughts and words and acts to the lessons 
which it involves, — if we could lift ourselves to 
a loftier sense of our relations to the Invisible, — 
if, in surveying our past history, we could catch 
larger and more exalted views of our destinies 
and our responsibilities, — if we could realize that 
the want of good men may be a heavier woe 
to a land than any want of what the world calls 
great men — our Centennial Year would not only 
be signalized by splendid ceremonials and magnifi- 
cent commemorations and gorgeous expositions, but 
it would go far towards fulfilling something of 
the grandeur of that " Acceptable Year " which 
was announced by higher than human lips, and 
would be the auspicious promise and pledge of a 
glorious second century of Independence and Free- 
dom for our country! 

For, if that second century of self-government is 
to go on safely to its close, or is to go on safely and 
prosperously at all, there must be some renewal of 
that old spirit of subordination and obedience to 
Divine, as well as human. Laws, which has been our 
security in the past. There must be faith in some- 
thing higher and better than ourselves. There must 
be a reverent acknowledgment of an Unseen, but 
All-seeing, All-controlling Ruler of the Universe. 
His Word, His Day, His House, His Worship, must 
be sacred to our children, as they have been to their 



96 ORATION. 

fathers; and His blessing must never fail to be 
invoked upon our land and upon our liberties. The 
patriot voice, which cried from the balcony of yonder 
Old State House, when the Declaration had been 
originally proclaimed, "Stability and Perpetuity to 
American Independence," did not fail to add, " God 
save our American States." I would prolong that 
ancestral prayer. And the last phrase to pass my 
lips at this hour, and to take its chance for remem- 
brance or oblivion in years to come, as the conclu- 
sion of this Centennial Oration, and as the sum, and 
summing up, of all I can say to the present or the 
future, shall be : — There is, there can be, no Inde- 
pendence of God : In Him, as a IsTation, no less than 
in Him, as individuals, " we live, and move, and have 
our being ! " God save ouk Amekioak States ! 



